The Roses of Heliogabalus

The Roses of Heliogabalus is an oil-on-canvas painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, completed in 1888 and now in the private Pérez Simón collection, Mexico; it measures 132.7 × 214.4 cm.

The subject comes from the Augustan History, which tells how the teenage emperor Elagabalus (also called Heliogabalus, reigned 218–222) released flowers from a reversible ceiling onto his dinner guests so abundantly that some of them suffocated. The ancient text speaks of violets and other flowers; Alma-Tadema turned them into a cascade of pink rose petals falling from a loosened canopy. Elagabalus, in a golden robe and tiara, watches from a raised table with his favoured companions, while a woman in a maenad's leopard skin plays the double pipes beside a column and a bronze Dionysus, modelled on the Ludovisi Dionysus, stands before a view of hills. The episode is probably invented; similar trick ceilings were attributed to Nero.

The picture was commissioned by the contractor and politician Sir John Aird for £4,000. It is reported that, because roses were out of season, Alma-Tadema had petals sent weekly from the French Riviera during the four winter months he worked on it, and that some of the silverwork and marble was still being painted on Varnishing Day. Signed with the opus number CCLXXXIII, it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1888, where the Art Journal called it the painter's chef d'oeuvre, and at the Paris Salon of 1893.

After the artist's death his reputation fell sharply. The painting sold for 483 guineas in 1935, failed to sell at Christie's in 1960, and passed to the television producer Allen Funt, whose collection was shown at the Metropolitan Museum in 1973 and sold at Sotheby's that year, the picture fetching £28,000. It made £1,500,000 at Christie's in 1993. In 2014–15 it was shown at Leighton House in London, its first London showing since the 1913 memorial exhibition.