As Alma-Tadema declared: 'I have always endeavoured in my pictures that the old Romans were human flesh and blood like ourselves, moved by the same passions and emotions.' This charming image of girls reading poetry, as his own two daughters might have done, illustrates this principle. As Alma-Tadema's career developed, he became more interested in such idyllic subjects and less in dramatic historical reconstructions such as the 'Pyrrhic Dance' .
Leopold Lowenstam was a reproductive etcher who exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1879, where he specialised in the works of Alma-Tadema.