Alfred Stevens was one of the most celebrated Belgian painters of elegant Parisian life in the nineteenth century, and one of the most celebrated chroniclers of elegant Parisian women of his era. Best known for his portraits of fashionable women in Second Empire Paris, he was a prominent figure in the glittering artistic milieu of Paris in the 1870s and 1880s, and a close contemporary of the Impressionists working in the city. He was most admired by fellow painters and critics alike for his virtuoso, near-monochrome handling of whites and greys. As the critic G. Vanzype wrote in 1936, his work is "the best example, after Vermeer, of what modest realism can achieve, served by an eye that is able to pick out fleeting radiances, and by a craftsmanship that is able to bring these into harmony."
Stevens turned increasingly to the sea after travelling to Sainte-Adresse on the advice of his physician, and over the following years returned regularly to the Normandy coast, finding in the changing sea, sky and shoreline a new and inexhaustible subject. Working largely on mahogany panels, he captured shifting weather and light through fluid passages of paint, vigorous brushwork and areas of rich impasto — work revealing the distinctly Impressionistic qualities of his later career, alongside his more familiar society portraits. He also produced sensitive, intimate depictions of children.
Stevens was an important influence on American painters of his time, most notably William Merritt Chase, and his work found a particular audience in the United States: Ready for the Ball, one of his most famous paintings, was bought directly from the artist in Paris in 1879 by William K. Vanderbilt, and today his paintings are held by over thirty American museums and institutions.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings has researched, exhibited and championed Stevens's work for more than fifty years. The bicentenary of his birth in 2023 coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the firm's pioneering Alfred Stevens exhibition and the accompanying monograph by Peter Mitchell - the first ever biography of the artist written in English - which helped begin the gradual revival of interest in his life and work.