- Artist
- Lawrence Alma-Tadema
- Year
- 1867
- Medium
- Oil on wood panel
- Dimensions
- Framed: 55.5 x 81 x 4.5 cm (21 7/8 x 31 7/8 x 1 3/4 in.); Unframed: 39 x 64.3 cm (15 3/8 x 25 5/16 in.)
Public Domain
Cleveland Museum of Art
Lawrence Alma-Tadema made his name reconstructing the ancient world with archaeological precision, and Pompeii was the obsession that launched him: a visit to the buried city in 1863 changed the course of his career. Glaucus and Nydia, painted four years later while he was still working in Brussels, illustrates the most popular novel of the age, Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, whose blind slave girl Nydia he would return to repeatedly. The panel shows Alma-Tadema already applying his exacting research to literary subjects, a formula that would make him the most lavishly rewarded painter of Victorian England.