Alfred Stevens was born in Brussels on May 11, 1823. He received his training in the Brussels studio of
François-Joseph Navez, a successful Belgian portraitist. Stevens belonged to the generation of
Joseph Lies,
Jean Pierre François Lamorinière and
Liévin De Winne. He received his training together with
Charles de Groux and
Jan Frans Portaels. Alfred Stevens and his brothers grew up with their grandfather, who ran the popular Brussels cafe ''de l'amitié''. The latter was an intellectual gathering place of progressionists and dissenters. Stevens' aversion to
history painting was manifested in his reaction to the current heroic romance of his time. He later wrote: "the historical subject was invented when people stopped being interested in painting itself." Two constants permeated both his upbringing and his later oeuvre: realism in his art and bourgeois materialism in his lifestyle. It was
Camille Roqueplan who persuaded Stevens to move to
Paris, which he did in 1851. His brothers also moved to Paris:
Joseph Stevens became a celebrated Belgian animal painter and Arthur Stevens, who was a critic, was the best advertisement for the brother painters. Alfred grew into a Parisian society that had mastered fashion
genre painting for almost twenty years. His paintings, in which he usually depicted lone women, are often a confluence of individual portraitures and types. Individual women disappeared behind their fashionable clothes and stereotypical attitudes. It gave his paintings a hint of theatricality and false sensibility. The female models of Stevens' paintings were described by
Joris-Karl Huysmans as
des petites femmes, qui ne sont plus des flamandes et qui ne seront jamais des Parisiennes. The graceful postures and elegant bodies are French, yet the women are more reminiscent of (stereotypical) Flanders. Stevens' characters often have strong facial features with a wide chin and short, sturdy arms and hands. opposed the neoclassicism paradigm and defended his transgressive
decadentism, stating:
"Littérature de décadence! Paroles vides de sens que nous entendons souvent tomber, avec la sonorité d’un bâillement emphatique, de la bouche de ces sphinx sans énigme qui veillent devant les portes saintes de l’Esthétique classique" 1867 was a successful year for Stevens: at the World Exhibition of that year he was given a separate room in which he could hang eighteen paintings; he was appointed to the Legion of Honor by Emperor Napoleon III, and imperial and royal orders poured in. The year before, he had been appointed an officer in the Order of Leopold . His group of friends included
Eugène Delacroix (who attended his wedding in 1858),
Alexandre Dumas Jr.,
Édouard Manet,
James Abbott McNeill Whistler and
Émile Zola. His contemporaries praised him, with the poet Robert de Montesquiou calling him
le sonnettiste de la peinture. After 1870, Stevens' popularity diminished, with Baudelaire, whose conferences in Belgium and travel to the Netherlands had turned into a fiasco, writing of him in the discriminatory and anti-Belgian
Pauvre Belgique:
"Le grand malheur de ce peintre minutieux, c ’est que la lettre, le bouquet, la chaise, la bague, la guipure, etc ..... deviennent, tour à tour, l’objet important, l’objet qui crève les yeux. — En somme, c ’est un peintre parfaitement
flamand, en tant qu ’il y ait de la perfection dans le néant
, ou dans l’imitation
de la nature, ce qui est la même chose." Beside being renowned for its realism,
The Parisian Sphinx has been described as enigmatic, with most critics pointing to the
femme-fatale figure, and the hidden dangers beyond feminine tenderness. Stevens painted other versions of
The Parisian Sphinx in 1870 and 1880. According to
Julian Bell, the model for the 1870 painting was
Victorine Meurent. ==Description==