Alfred Stevens

Alfred Stevens is remembered for exquisitely dressed women in Parisian interiors, but that polished world was not where his career began. In 1854 he painted a Paris street scene in which soldiers lead a poor mother and her children away for vagrancy. The Musée d'Orsay describes it as a denunciation of urban poverty and harsh treatment of the poor. Later Stevens became famous for fashionable domestic scenes, where a letter, a gesture or a private conversation turns luxury into a setting for anxiety, disappointment or consolation. Critics compared his attention to dress and interiors with 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painting. He also encouraged several women artists, including Sarah Bernhardt, at a time when women in France were still restricted from the same academic study available to men.