Marie-Madeleine

Around 1887 Alfred Stevens, a Belgian who had made his name in Paris painting fashionable women in their drawing rooms, met the most famous actress of the age, Sarah Bernhardt. She is the model here. He casts her as Mary Magdalene, with the skull of old vanitas pictures beside her and a bleak wilderness behind, but the face is pure 1880s theatre: heavy-lidded, sensual, staring out with an almost feverish intensity. That unsettled people. Audiences of the time wanted their Magdalene weeping and penitent, and Stevens gave them a woman who looks less repentant than entranced. The Parisian dealer Georges Petit had ordered the picture. It reads now like a portrait of Bernhardt in costume as much as a saint.