On 15 September 1888 Vincent van Gogh was intrigued to read an account of an up-to-date artist’s house in the literary supplement of Le Figaro. This described a purple house in the middle of a garden, the paths of which were made of yellow sand. The walls were glass bricks ‘in the shape of purple eggs’.
Such aesthetic dwellings were all the rage; Van Gogh dreamed of having one himself in Arles. But as one learns from an exhibition at Leighton House, it was another 19th-century Dutch artist, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who actually inhabited two such establishments — one off Regent’s Park, the other in St John’s Wood.
On paper, Van Gogh and Alma-Tadema have a great deal in common. The former was born in 1853 in a small village in the south of the Netherlands, the latter, 17 years older and originally christened Lourens, came from Dronryp, a tiny settlement in the extreme north.
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