Spring (Alma-Tadema painting)

Spring is an 1894 oil-on-canvas painting by the Anglo-Dutch artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, which has been in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, since 1972.

Towards the rear of the procession is a bearded priest holding a metal jug, with other attendants carrying a casket, a torch, and a large portable ivory altar which is emerging from the building to the right.

Other attendants bear two silver sculptures of a horned satyr with a child and fruit, and two more hold poles with a banner slung between, bearing a Latin fragment (then attributed to Catullus, known as Carmina Catulli 8): "Hunc lucum tibi dedico consecroque, Priape / qua domus tua Lampsacist quaque silva, Priape/ nam te praecipue in suis urbibus colit ora / Hellespontia ceteris ostreosior oris" (loosely translated: "This enclosure I dedicate and consecrate to thee, Priapus / At Lampsacus where is thy home and sacred grove, Priapus / For thee specially in its coastal cities are you worshipped / Of Hellespont more abundant in oysters than all other coasts").

A bearded bust to the lower left may be a self-portrait of Alma-Tadema, beside the base of a column where the painting is signed and numbered: " L Alma Tadema Op CCCXXVI".

The frame above the painting displays its title, "Spring", and the bottom of the frame has four lines of poetry from Algernon Charles Swinburne's 1865 poem "Dedication" written in honour of the painter Edward Burne-Jones: "In a land of clear colours and stories, / In a region of shadowless hours, / Where earth has a garment of glories / And a murmur of musical flowers".

After his death in 1910, it was sold at the American Art Association, and then bought in 1912 from the dealer Henry Reinhardt Galleries in Chicago by Thomas F. Cole.

Detail of musicians and procession