Alfred Stevens: Friendship with Edouard Manet

"The Parisian Sphinx" by Alfred Stevens

"The friendship between Alfred Stevens and Edouard Manet strengthened in the decade of the 1860's. Their relationship was one of mutual respect and admiration. A letter of Manet's survives in which he wrote, 'Yesterday I saw at Hoschede's a SUPERB Stevens, please pass on to him my sincere compliments.' At the Thursday evening gatherings at Madame Auguste Manet's, Stevens regularly met Degas, the mercurial Baudelaire and the Morisot sisters. 

Manet used Stevens' studio to paint Spanish dancers from the Hippodrome. At another time Manet asked Stevens if he could leave some of his work in his studio so that it might be seen by Durand-Ruel, on one of his visits. The great dealer duly came by and, with characteristic foresight, bought the Manets. 

Stevens, Degas and the Manet brothers were together in refusing to leave during the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, and, above all, during the siege of Paris. Stevens, of course, as a foreigner did not have to serve in the French forces but he insisted in volunteering, and this was never forgotten by the French authorities. But he did send Marie and their children to Brussels, writing to her by balloon, and kept his mother with him in Paris.

The fact that the siege did not prevent his painting will hardly surprise the reader. It is difficult to imagine what could have done so! Victorine Meurent, a model shared by Manet and Stevens, appears as the Sphinx Parisien in one of the most ravishing of Stevens' small canvases. Inscribed on the reverse is 'painted during the siege of Paris, Nov. 1870'. 

Later on, when his friend Manet died in 1883, Stevens was one of the pallbearers and, of course, on a committee to campaign for the exhibition of his work."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Alfred Stevens" by Peter Mitchell.)