Alfred Stevens (1817-1875), painter, sculptor and interior decorator, was the first British sculptor to introduce an inventive Renaissance-inspired vein into English sculpture of the mid 19th century. Stevens went to Italy in 1833, travelling to Florence and Rome. In Rome he worked as an assistant to Thorwaldsen from 1841-2, returning to England later in that year. It was during this period that Stevens was able to nurture the fascination with the Italian Renaissance which transpires in his later sculpture and industrial design.
He was the chief designer for Hoole & Co., the Sheffield metal firm, from 1850 to 1857. He created a series of imaginative and often complex functional works of art, ranging from fire-grates, stoves, fenders, chimney-pieces to hunting knives, each of these being successfully adapted to their practical function, and yet simultaneously imbued with a high level of artistic design.
The present pair of reliefs are part of the series of industrial designs Stevens executed for Hoole's; a wax model of the left hand figure survives in the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, and is illustrated in Beattie (op. cit.). This photograph of his Sheffield models clearly reveals Stevens' stylistic versatility, spanning from Michelangelesque ignudi firedogs to an Art Nouveau Rape of Proserpine fireback to the present Quattrocento Donatellesque Putti fire-grate or chimney-piece elements. As with all these fittings, the Putti are broadly modelled, their vertical emphasis enlivened by the turn of the heads and torsos, and by the movement in their raised feet. The present casts are further enriched by the textural patterning on the foliage of the organic cornucopiae, and though originally part of a larger functional whole, thanks to their strong modelling and charming subject matter, stand as interesting and decorative sculptures on thier own.