Alfred Émile Léopold Stevens

Bateaux sur la mer - Ciel nuageux - Realist Seascape Oil by Alfred Stevens

c.1890

Signed oil on canvas seascape circa 1920 by French naive painter Camille Bombois. This work depicts workers out at sea on a large sail boat with a few ...

Signed and dated oil on panel seascape by French post impressionist painter Gustave Cariot. The work depicts a view of sail boats and steam boats out at sea in the bay of Saint-Malo ...

Signed and dated impressionist oil on panel seascape painting by French painter Maxime Maufra. This stunning work depicts the beach at Morgat in Brittany, northwest France. The cryst...

Signed seascape oil on panel circa 1910 by French painter post impressionist painter Adolphe Louis Gaussen. The work depicts a view of the bright blue sea from a rocky shoreline on t...

Alfred Stevens Brussels 1823 – 1906 Paris Belgian Painter 'Moonlight on the Sea' Signature: signed lower right and dated 1892 ‘A Stevens 92' Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: image size 81 x 65 cm, frame size 97,5 x 81,5 cm Provenance: Collection M. Klein, 1900 Galerie Petit, Paris, 18 June 1926, no. 22 Private collection, Europe De Vuyst, Belgium, 1998 Galerie Kupperman, Amsterdam Private collection, The Netherlands Exhibitions: Exposition of the Works of Alfred Stevens, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1928 Retrospective Alfred Stevens, École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1900, no. 100 Literature: A. Stevens, Mercatorfonds, Brussels, p. 100 Alfred Stevens, François Boucher, Ed. Rieder, Paris, 1930, illustrated on p. 36 Documentation by Mrs. Christiane Lefebvre, 1998 Biography: Alfred Émile Léopold Stevens (11 May 1823 – 24 August 1906) was a prominent Belgian painter renowned for his depictions of elegant modern women. His works, characterized by a realistic style and meticulous attention to detail, reveal the influence of 17th-century Dutch genre painting. While he initially gained attention for his social realist portrayal of the hardships faced by impoverished vagrants, he later achieved great critical and popular success with his portrayals of upper-middle class Parisian life. Notably, he often used the same models repeatedly, with some of them being identified in the infamous Book of the Courtesans, a confidential surveillance file maintained by the Paris vice squad, as noted by author Summer Brennan. Stevens was born in Brussels, into a family deeply connected with the visual arts. His older brother Joseph (1816–1892) and his son Léopold (1866–1935) were both painters, while his other brother Arthur (1825–1899) was an art dealer and critic. His father, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars under the army of William I of the Netherlands, was an art collector with a notable collection of watercolors by Eugène Delacroix and other esteemed artists. Stevens’s upbringing was influenced by the environment of Café de l’Amitié, run by his maternal grandparents in Brussels, which served as a meeting place for prominent figures from the political, literary, and artistic spheres. Following the death of his father in 1837, Stevens left middle school to enroll at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. There, he came under the tutelage of François Navez, a Neo-Classical painter and former student of Jacques-Louis David, who was both the director of the academy and an old acquaintance of Stevens’s grandfather. Following a traditional curriculum, he initially drew from casts of classical sculptures and later transitioned to drawing from live models. In 1843, Stevens journeyed to Paris to join his already established brother, Joseph. He gained admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, the preeminent art school in Paris, although claims of him being a student of the director, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, are likely unfounded. One of his early works, The Pardon or Absolution (Hermitage, St. Petersburg), signed and dated 1849, showcased his mastery of a conventional naturalistic style influenced by 17th-century Dutch genre painting. Stevens’s work was first publicly exhibited in 1851, when three of his paintings were featured at the Brussels Salon. He received a third-class medal at the Paris Salon in 1853, followed by a second-class medal at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855. His painting Ce qu’on appelle le vagabondage [What is called vagrancy] (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) garnered attention from Napoleon III, leading to a change in policy regarding the use of soldiers to remove the poor from the streets. Two other paintings displayed at the Salon in Antwerp in the same year, Chez soi or At Home and The Painter and his Model, introduced subjects from “la vie moderne” that became characteristic of his oeuvre: elegant young women dressed in contemporary fashion and artists in their studios. In 1857, Stevens made his first significant sale to a private collector when Consolation was purchased for a rumored 6,000 francs by the Berlin collector and dealer Ravéné. He and his brother also became part of the artistic milieu in Paris, frequenting salons hosted by Princess Mathilde and popular cafes, where they mingled with the likes of the Goncourt brothers, Théophile Gautier, and Alexandre Dumas. Stevens married Fanny Juliette Albertine Marie Hortense Blanc (1836-1891), a member of a wealthy Belgian family and a long-time acquaintance of the Stevens family, in 1858. The wedding was witnessed by the renowned painter Eugène Delacroix. The couple had four children: Leopold, Jean, Catherine, and Pierre. Stevens depicted his wife in numerous portraits, including Regrets and Memories. After her passing, he expressed enduring grief at her loss. During the 1860s, Stevens rose...

Henri Arden (1858 – 1917) Picture Size: 20 x 24" (51 x 61cm) Outside Frame Size: 27 x 31" (69 x 79cm) Oil on Canvas Signed bottom right Free shipping Arden was born to English pare...

This lovely Italian 19th century Spezia marine oil painting is by noted artist Agostino Fossati. It depicts an evening glow across the bay. This oil on panel was painted circa 1870 a...

Charles Euphrasie Kuwasseg French, (1838-1904) A Normandy Port Oil on canvas, signed & dated 1875 Image size: 21.5 inches x 38.75 inches Size including frame: 30.25 inches x 47.5 inches A wonderful seascape painting of a port in Normandy by Charles Euphrasie Kuwasseg. The scene shows large ships anchored...