Alfred Stevens: First Success

"La Visite" by Alfred Stevens

"In 1844, Alfred Stevens left for Paris in the care of a family friend, the painter Camille Roqueplan. Poor health obliged Roqueplan to go to the South of France and Stevens entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts, the only pupil of Roqueplan's to be admitted. Five years later found him sharing a studio with another Belgian born painter, Florent Willems, well established in Paris. 

On Stevens' debut at the Paris Salon in 1853, he showed three paintings, one of which was 'The Morning of Ash Wednesday.' The reader would be pressed to recognize this painting as the work of Stevens when compared to his work later on. At that time artists were caught up in a swirling current of change from traditional to 'modern' painting. What impressed the Jury, consisting of painters, was that the debutant's canvas was well painted. They well understood the soundness of his technique. It has been constantly repeated that Stevens was a painter's painter and indeed he was.

Thus 'Ash Wednesday' won official blessing and was bought by the government for the Marseilles Museum and Stevens won a third class medal - the first of a chestful - but he had not yet found his vocation. However, in 1854-55, he exhibited three paintings in Brussels and Antwerp whose titles, 'La Sieste,' 'Reverie' and 'Chez Soi' tell us that it was a turning point in the search for his true subject. In 1857, he finally found his subject - in a word 'La Femme.'A painting entitled 'La Visite', the first of many, many variations of this very adaptable subject down through his career. 

His painting 'Artist in His Studio' was also a break-through and the first of a series of very important works where the studio is the setting, and Stevens could either depict himself as present or not, and vary the quantity of ladies, whether models or visitors. For example in 'La Psyche,' the model is alone in the studio amused by her reflection in the mirror. Only a cigarette butt and a used match, in the right foreground, remind us of the momentarily absent master. Incidentally 'La Psyche' belonged to the Comte Robert de Montesquiou, the poet and aesthete immortalized by Whistler."

To be continued

(From "Alfred Stevens" by Peter Mitchell.)