Alfred Stevens Art

Alfred Stevens Brussels 1823 – 1906 Paris Belgian Painter 'Moonlight on the Sea' Signature: signed lower right and dated 1892 ‘A Stevens 92' Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: image size 81 x 65 cm, frame size 97,5 x 81,5 cm Provenance: Collection M. Klein, 1900 Galerie Petit, Paris, 18 June 1926, no. 22 Private collection, Europe De Vuyst, Belgium, 1998 Galerie Kupperman, Amsterdam Private collection, The Netherlands Exhibitions: Exposition of the Works of Alfred Stevens, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1928 Retrospective Alfred Stevens, École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1900, no. 100 Literature: A. Stevens, Mercatorfonds, Brussels, p. 100 Alfred Stevens, François Boucher, Ed. Rieder, Paris, 1930, illustrated on p. 36 Documentation by Mrs. Christiane Lefebvre, 1998 Biography: Alfred Émile Léopold Stevens (11 May 1823 – 24 August 1906) was a prominent Belgian painter renowned for his depictions of elegant modern women. His works, characterized by a realistic style and meticulous attention to detail, reveal the influence of 17th-century Dutch genre painting. While he initially gained attention for his social realist portrayal of the hardships faced by impoverished vagrants, he later achieved great critical and popular success with his portrayals of upper-middle class Parisian life. Notably, he often used the same models repeatedly, with some of them being identified in the infamous Book of the Courtesans, a confidential surveillance file maintained by the Paris vice squad, as noted by author Summer Brennan. Stevens was born in Brussels, into a family deeply connected with the visual arts. His older brother Joseph (1816–1892) and his son Léopold (1866–1935) were both painters, while his other brother Arthur (1825–1899) was an art dealer and critic. His father, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars under the army of William I of the Netherlands, was an art collector with a notable collection of watercolors by Eugène Delacroix and other esteemed artists. Stevens’s upbringing was influenced by the environment of Café de l’Amitié, run by his maternal grandparents in Brussels, which served as a meeting place for prominent figures from the political, literary, and artistic spheres. Following the death of his father in 1837, Stevens left middle school to enroll at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. There, he came under the tutelage of François Navez, a Neo-Classical painter and former student of Jacques-Louis David, who was both the director of the academy and an old acquaintance of Stevens’s grandfather. Following a traditional curriculum, he initially drew from casts of classical sculptures and later transitioned to drawing from live models. In 1843, Stevens journeyed to Paris to join his already established brother, Joseph. He gained admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, the preeminent art school in Paris, although claims of him being a student of the director, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, are likely unfounded. One of his early works, The Pardon or Absolution (Hermitage, St. Petersburg), signed and dated 1849, showcased his mastery of a conventional naturalistic style influenced by 17th-century Dutch genre painting. Stevens’s work was first publicly exhibited in 1851, when three of his paintings were featured at the Brussels Salon. He received a third-class medal at the Paris Salon in 1853, followed by a second-class medal at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855. His painting Ce qu’on appelle le vagabondage [What is called vagrancy] (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) garnered attention from Napoleon III, leading to a change in policy regarding the use of soldiers to remove the poor from the streets. Two other paintings displayed at the Salon in Antwerp in the same year, Chez soi or At Home and The Painter and his Model, introduced subjects from “la vie moderne” that became characteristic of his oeuvre: elegant young women dressed in contemporary fashion and artists in their studios. In 1857, Stevens made his first significant sale to a private collector when Consolation was purchased for a rumored 6,000 francs by the Berlin collector and dealer Ravéné. He and his brother also became part of the artistic milieu in Paris, frequenting salons hosted by Princess Mathilde and popular cafes, where they mingled with the likes of the Goncourt brothers, Théophile Gautier, and Alexandre Dumas. Stevens married Fanny Juliette Albertine Marie Hortense Blanc (1836-1891), a member of a wealthy Belgian family and a long-time acquaintance of the Stevens family, in 1858. The wedding was witnessed by the renowned painter Eugène Delacroix. The couple had four children: Leopold, Jean, Catherine, and Pierre. Stevens depicted his wife in numerous portraits, including Regrets and Memories. After her passing, he expressed enduring grief at her loss. During the 1860s, Stevens rose...