Lot Essay
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 eighteeen 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. In the Country dates from this period, and joins the ranks of his greatest paintings such as India in Paris, The Bath and Autumn Flowers. In our painting, Stevens has placed his model in a rare outdoor setting, standing in front of a garden bench set against a dark green landscape dotted with spring flowers. She is a typical Stevens "type"--not a conventional beauty, but always stunning, or what one might call a jolie laide. Shown in profile, she wears an elegant dress of gauzy, satin-striped white silk over a pale yellow underdress, and holds a pale pink parasol in her gloved left hand. Stevens, like many of his contemporaries such as Tissot, Manet and Whistler was influenced by the compostiions found in Japanese wood block prints, and here he uses this new style strikingly in the juxtaposition of the pale yellow dress silhouetted against the dark green ground, creating a flat appearance very similar to a Japanese woodcut.
In the Country has been called "one of the finest Stevens in America." (W. Coles, Alfred Stevens, exh. cat., Ann Arbor, 1977, no. 14). It originally belonged to the prominent 19th century Philadelphia collector, Henry C. Gibson, who was known to have limited his collection to a select group of 100 paintings. He exhibited them in a series of marble-lined rooms resembling Pompeian chapels. The early history of the painting is unknown. It is very possible that Gibson purchased the Stevens directly from the artist, as was the practice of many of the most prominent American collectors during this time.
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.
Stevens's greatest triumph came in 1867 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris where he exhibited eighteeen 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. In the Country dates from this period, and joins the ranks of his greatest paintings such as India in Paris, The Bath and Autumn Flowers. In our painting, Stevens has placed his model in a rare outdoor setting, standing in front of a garden bench set against a dark green landscape dotted with spring flowers. She is a typical Stevens "type"--not a conventional beauty, but always stunning, or what one might call a jolie laide. Shown in profile, she wears an elegant dress of gauzy, satin-striped white silk over a pale yellow underdress, and holds a pale pink parasol in her gloved left hand. Stevens, like many of his contemporaries such as Tissot, Manet and Whistler was influenced by the compostiions found in Japanese wood block prints, and here he uses this new style strikingly in the juxtaposition of the pale yellow dress silhouetted against the dark green ground, creating a flat appearance very similar to a Japanese woodcut.
In the Country has been called "one of the finest Stevens in America." (W. Coles, Alfred Stevens, exh. cat., Ann Arbor, 1977, no. 14). It originally belonged to the prominent 19th century Philadelphia collector, Henry C. Gibson, who was known to have limited his collection to a select group of 100 paintings. He exhibited them in a series of marble-lined rooms resembling Pompeian chapels. The early history of the painting is unknown. It is very possible that Gibson purchased the Stevens directly from the artist, as was the practice of many of the most prominent American collectors during this time.
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.