The Unconscious Rivals here are depicted in the usual opulent space for Dutch/English painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema and are displaying different forms of absorption.
The seated woman in the 1893 oil painting seems to plot while the standing woman on the right is posturing. The flowers obscuring the stressed statue on the left perhaps relate to a façade of pleasantry hiding conflict.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Unconscious Rivals is in the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery in England.