Spring (Alma-Tadema painting)

Spring is an 1894 oil on canvas painting by the Anglo Dutch artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, showing an imagined procession of women, children and musicians descending a flower strewn marble stairway between classical buildings, accompanied by a bearded priest, attendants carrying religious objects and silver statues of satyrs, in a scene that blends the Victorian custom of May Day flower gathering with an invented vision of a Roman spring festival rather than any single historical event. Alma-Tadema spent four years on the painting, which measures about 178.4 by 80.3 centimetres and is held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; its procession scene is said to have inspired the triumphal entry sequence in the 1934 film Cleopatra directed by Cecil B. DeMille.