Alma-Tadema: The Death of the Pharaoh’s Firstborn Son

During much of the 19th century, Egypt, for various and related reasons, aroused a very unprecedented interest among the British, producing such claim an abundant amount of pictorial work and, of course, a good number of luxury collectors and merchants related to the ancient civilization on the banks of the Nile.

Archaeology or Spoliation?

The nineteenth century is the century of archaeology, propitiated in the case of the European powers by the political control over extensive geographical areas of Antiquity and by the fascination of rediscovering it, which finds its cultural origins in the fever of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. In such circumstances, the British Empire gathered, so to speak, all the skills to stage the fascinating fashion of Egyptian mystery and its amassed treasures that, in another interpretative order and many years later, the notable and radical Zahi Hawass would describe as spoliation (Egypt was an English protectorate between 1882 and 1922).

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

That fashion brought a good British pictorial production of Egyptian theme: although he is not one of the most prolific authors in this respect, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a great Victorian painter born in Holland in 1836, dedicated some of his best works to the recreation of that theme, which had, as is notorious, explicit references to the world of death and the culture of the ancient.

The Death of the Firstborn

Among his Egyptian reference paintings, we want to highlight here the magnificent The Death of the Pharaoh’s Firstborn Son (1872), a work very appreciated by the author and also by critics: "If Tadema had only painted this work, it would be enough to count it among the most outstanding artists of this time," wrote biographer George Ebers.

The painting in question shows the Pharaoh with his deceased son on his lap while his wife grieves about the corpse. The doctor, devastated, and the figures in the foreground, at the bottom right, make up an energetic and sad situational reality, accentuated by a dark illumination; in the background, the musicians play funeral music and, beyond, Moses and Aaron are seen appearing, an almost stereotypical biblical license in the pseudomythological scenes of the time.

The chromatic arc is brief, although the complexity of the details and the many archaeological references in the work of art show us, in all its splendor, the pictorial character of Alma-Tadema. The garlands of flowers on the ground, an archaeological find indeed after the realization of the work, or the gold chain with a scarab that the deceased carries are some of the references of this precious and condensed painting, so characteristic of the nineteenth-century master of the representations of luxury, classic decadence, and beauty.