Charles Baudelaire admired Joseph Édouard Stevens enough to dedicate a piece of his prose poetry to him directly: "Les Bons Chiens" ("Good Dogs"), one of the closing works in Petits Poèmes en Prose, stands as a rare instance of a major French poet honouring a painter through his own verse, and reflects the esteem in which Stevens's unsentimental, closely observed depictions of street dogs were held by the leading literary and artistic figures of his day. Born in Brussels in 1816, the son of an art dealer and collector, and the elder brother of the far more internationally celebrated genre painter Alfred Stevens, Joseph was largely self-taught, attending classes informally at the Brussels Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under Louis Robbe and Eugène Verboeckhoven before completing his development in Paris, where he moved in Barbizon School circles that included Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, Thomas Couture and Théodore Rousseau.
Stevens devoted his career almost entirely to dogs, painting portraits, street scenes, dog markets and animals working for travelling entertainers, and his work evolved from an early Romantic sentimentality towards a starker, more Realist treatment of animal and street life that won him the admiration of Gustave Courbet and established him as a genuine pioneer of Realism within Belgian painting, some years ahead of the movement's wider acceptance. In 1868 he was a founding member of the Société Libre des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, an artists' circle formed specifically to challenge academic convention and advance Realist and independent artistic practice, and he received the Légion d'Honneur in 1861. Despite his own reclusive tendencies, Stevens benefited throughout his career from his brothers' connections, Alfred's introductions into fashionable Parisian society and Arthur's work as an art dealer and critic helping to sustain a career that might otherwise have remained more obscure. His work is held today by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, among other institutions.