Alfred Emile Stevens

Alfred Emile Stevens (1823-1906), Belgian painter, renowned for his scenes of contemporary life, and particularly of middle-class women. Stevens was born into an artistically accomplished family in Brussels. He was educated in Brussels and Paris, where he is believed to have been taught by French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Stevens spent most of his career in Paris and received a number of important commissions there, including one for a painting entitled Panorama of the Century, 1789-1889 (now destroyed), which was shown at the Exposition Universelle of 1889. In 1900 he was given his own exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Although his early work was influenced by the realism of French painter Gustave Courbet, beginning in the late 1850s Stevens concentrated on portraying middle-class women in their houses, as in The Flowers of Autumn (1867, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels). He was particularly successful at representing the texture of fabric, and, following the fashion of the day, introduced Japanese-style decoration into many of his works. His later paintings are characterized by more expressive brushwork, as exemplified by a series of beach scenes he painted beginning in the 1880s.

Although Stevens was not himself a great innovator, his work influenced several other artists, including French painter Jacques-Joseph Tissot and American painters James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent.