Queen Clotilde, wife of King Clovis, is shown training her three young children the art of hurling the ax in order to avenge the death of her fatherIt was intended that the boy would become a lawyer but in 1851 at the age of fifteen he suffered a physical and mental breakdown. The Education of the Children of Clovis (1861), oil on canvas, 127 x 176.8 cm, private collection.

He received his first art training with a local drawing master hired to teach his older half-brothers. His mother had artistic leanings, and decided that drawing lessons should be incorporated into the children's education. His father died when Laurens was four, leaving his mother with five children: Laurens, his sister, and three boys from his father’s first marriage. The Tadema family moved in 1838 to the near town of Leeuwarden, where Pieter’s position as a notary would be more lucrative.

He did not actually hyphenate his last name, but it was done by others and this has since become the convention. Laurens would later adopt the more English Lawrence for his forename, and incorporate Alma into his surname so that he appeared at the beginning of exhibition catalogues, under 'A' rather than under 'T'.

Tadema is an old Frisian patronymic (meaning 'Adam-son', the suffix ma being 'son of'), while the names Laurens and Alma came from his godfather. 1876), Laurence's sister, for whom he had great affection. Her first child died early and the second was Atje (c.1834-c. Hinke Brouwer was the half sister of Pieter Tadema's first wife. He was the sixth child of Pieter Jiltes Tadema (1797–1840), the village notary, who had had three sons by a previous marriage, and the third child of his mother, Hinke Dirks Brouwer (c. Lawrence Alma-Tadema was born as Lourens Alma Tadema on 8 January 1836, in the small village of Dronrijp, in Friesland in the north of the Netherlands. Though admired during his lifetime for his draftsmanship and depictions of Classical antiquity, his work fell into disrepute after his death, and only since the 1960s has it been reevaluated for its importance within nineteenth-century English art. A classical-subject painter, he became famous for his depictions of the luxury and decadence of the Roman Empire, with languorous figures set in fabulous marbled interiors or against a backdrop of dazzling blue Mediterranean Sea and sky. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, OM, RA ( /ˈælmə ˈtædɪmə/ 8 January 1836 – 25 June 1912) was a Dutch painter.īorn in Dronrijp, the Netherlands, and trained at the Royal Academy of Antwerp, Belgium, he settled in England in 1870 and spent the rest of his life there.

Sir lawrence tadema