"The work of Mr. Alfred Stevens could be called 'The poem of the woman of the world.'" wrote Théophile Gautier in his review of the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, an exhibition that earned Stevens a first class medal and a promotion to Officer of the Legion of Honor. Today, the name of the 19th century Belgian painter, Alfred Stevens is all but obscure, even though during his lifetime the roster of his closest friends and associates included Delacroix, Courbet, Corot, Manet, Rousseau, Whistler and Degas. Alfred Stevens's obscurity may stem partly from the difficulty one has in identifying his unique style. He really cannot be neatly classified as an Impressionist, nor as an Academic painter. However, he was a Modernist, and his paintings of women that date from the late 1860's are as modern in conception and execution as anything by Manet and Monet. While Stevens's earliest paintings treated social and historical themes, and his late works included marine subjects executed during his sojourns on the Normandy coast, his greatest achievement was as a painter of women. He "applied the brilliant resources of his superior art to the representation of the modern woman, especially the Parisienne." His "eternal model" was "the woman of the world, dressed in velvet, satin or silk...in all her artificial splendor." (V. Steele, Paris Fashion, New York, 1988, p. 179). The costumes worn by Stevens's women accurately document the fashions of the Second Empire, while they also celebrate the joy found in painting by an artist who transformed the color and textures of costume into paint on a canvas. Stevens himself remarked in his 1886 Impressions on Painting: "A man is not a modernist because he paints modern costumes. The artist in love with modernity should, first of all, be impregnated with modern sensations." Stevens's images of women in interiors--reading letters, gazing at their reflections in mirrors, arranging flowers or daydreaming--also smack of modernity in their lack of anecdote. A glove held in a hand
becomes primarily a still life, or a vehicle for depicting color and line, and this interpretation is modern in its conception.

l'Étude du Rôle, dated 1888, comes from the decade of Stevens's great portraits of Sarah Bernhardt. In this painting, a stunning young actress is shown rehearsing her role in a full-length mirror. The room displays a variety of still lifes: an oriental screen draped with a kimono, a brown velvet-covered table holding the pages of an open script and a black mask, and in the background a glimpse of a framed portrait on the wall. A striped awning composed in a symphony of soft yellow and white tones can be seen through the open window, where the silhouette of a tree is reflected in the sunlit cloth. The sheer gold-threaded camisole of the model, tied at the neck with a pink satin ribbon, hints at her sensuality. Her long skirt falls in a cascade of undulating folds, and the lavender satin sash at her waist underscores Stevens's brilliant and subtle use of color. Stevens never depicted a nude in his entire career. Even the model bathing in the tub in 1867 The Bath in the Musée d'Orsay is wearing her underclothes! Contemporary critics noted that Stevens could convey a strongly sensuous mood with a minimum of flesh exposed (W. Coles, p. 39), and certainly l'Étude du Rôle, exemplifies this commentary!

l'Étude du Rôle offers us a glimpse into the world of Alfred Stevens--an artist who was as avant garde in subject and technique as the impressionists, and whose women were as modern as Manet's Victorine Meurent and Monet's Camille.