A juggler

An itinerant Egyptian entertainer is juggling with eggs in the atrium of a luxurious Roman villa. Alma-Tadema reconstructs the scene with scrupulous attention to historical detail. Yet he conceives the subject casually as if it were a snapshot of real life. Alma-Tadema’s combination of the archaeological and the anecdotal scored an immense success with a Victorian public well practised at reading the story in a picture.