Mark Carroll's Journal

I hadn't seen that one. It's an odd one: chess the game we know is a fair bit younger than ancient Egypt -- but all the pieces in the painting are the same, and the board has 10 rows, so he must have been using 'chess' more like "board game", I think.

But I like high realism art, and classical subjects, and like the idea of him researching cutting edge research of the time for his paintings. Even if half the women look like English beauties. :p

He also started putting Opus numbers on his paintings, serial numbers basically, to make forgery more difficult. Wiki:

"In 1872 Alma-Tadema organised his paintings into an identification system by including an opus number under his signature and assigning his earlier pictures numbers as well. Portrait of my sister, Artje, painted in 1851, is numbered opus I, while two months before his death he completed Preparations in the Coliseum, opus CCCCVIII. Such a system made it more difficult for fakes to be passed off as originals.[16] "