Winter Is Coming: The Voice of Spring by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1910)

When in 1910 the aging Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted The Voice of Spring, he returned to a subject he had dealt with many times: the awakening of nature in springtime. The painting depicts an idyllic landscape belonging to a long-lost golden age and evokes, in the background, a spirit of celebration, dance, and music. Yet the tone of The Voice of Spring seems elegiac more than festive. Shadows hang over the scene and the trees still look bleak. The young woman in the foreground seems untouched by the celebrations behind her: she stares outside the picture, musing, as if in another world. Elegy may have been the proper register for Tadema’s work at the time: his long-time wife Laura had died a year earlier, making the artist a widower for the second time, alone in a world that was quickly coming to an end. This may suggest an autobiographical reading. Yet the centrality in Tadema’s oeuvre of the theme of spring suggests that his final return to the subject transcends such a reading. More than just a work of personal mourning, the painting also presents itself as a meditation on the cyclical essence of human existence, alternating between love and death, spring and fall, creation and demise.