Alfred Stevens

(b Brussels, 1823; d Paris, 1906) Belgian Painter. Alfred Stevens’s paintings of women have been compared to “a rare perfume concentrated within a scent bottle”- -words written by the 19th century writer and art critic, Camille Lemonnier to describe Stevens’s visual “poems” of the modern woman of the Second Empire dressed in the finest satins, velvets and silks. This popular Parisian type became Stevens’s trademark, as well as his means to define modernity in both subject and painting technique. Stevens’s greatest triumph came in 1867 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris where he exhibited eighteen paintings, received a first class medal, was promoted to Officer of the Legion of Honor, and invited to an Imperial Grand Ball at the Tuileries… Stevens’s women from the 1860s exemplify the new wave of painting that was announcing itself in France at this time. In their lack of anecdotal expression, his women reading letters, bathing, daydreaming or gazing out of windows represent this new painting and celebrate one of the important themes- that of genre without anecdote- that would come to define Impressionism. (Credit: Christie’s, New York, 19th Century European Paintings, Drawings and Watercolors and Sculpture, May 27, 1993, Lot 210)

Alfred Stevens

1817-1875

Past Lots

Attrib. to Alfred Stevens (1817-1875), a young lady with a fan in an interior, oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm