signed with initials and titled 'LAT/the Contrary Oracle'' (lower right, by the artist’s daughter Anna) pencil with red and white chalk Unframed: 10.4 x 27.3 cm. (4 1/8 x 10 3/4 in.) Framed: 24.9 x 41 cm. (9 3/4 x 16 1/8 in.)Provenance:The studio of the artist;The artist’s brother-in-law, Sir Edmund William Gosse (1849-1928), London;By descent in the Gosse family until the 1920s or 1930s;Acquired by a private collector;Thence by descent until 2015. Literature:S. Moser, Painting Antiquity: Ancient Egypt in the Art of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Poynter and Edwin Long, New York 2020, p. 513, note 26Notes:Part of a group of early drawings by Alma-Tadema, all taken from a sketchbook, which may be dated to circa 1857-1858. The drawings may be related to a series of paintings of Egyptian subjects, entitled Going to the Oracle and The Contrary Oracle, that Alma-Tadema planned in 1857 and 1858, but never executed. The first owner of these drawings was Alma-Tadema’s brother-in-law, the art critic and biographer Edmund Gosse (1849-1928). In 1882 Gosse, who was married to a sister of Alma-Tadema’s second wife, Laura Epps, published one of the first biographies of the artist, in which he noted that some of his paintings of Egyptian subjects ‘are to be counted among the highest expressions of Alma-Tadema’s genius.’ References:E. W. Gosse, ‘Lawrence Alma-Tadema. R.A.’, in Illustrated Biographies of Modern Artists, edited by François Guillaume Dumas, London and Paris 1882, p. 78