- 307
Alfred Stevens Belgian, 1823-1906
bidding is closed
Description
- Alfred Stevens
- L’heureuse mère
- signed Alfred Stevens. l.l.
- oil on panel
- 66 by 41cm., 26 by 16in.
Provenance
F. Vander Donckt, Sainte-Adresse (1879)
Sale: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 18 June 1887, lot 51
Emile Clarembaux, Brussels (his sale: Galerie Georges Petit / J. & A. Le Roy Frères, Brussels, 22-23 March 1911, lot 44)
Monsieur Girard, Paris (purchased at the above sale)
Collection Peeters, Olne
Literature
Gustave Van Zype, Les Frères Stevens, Brussels, 1936, no. 233, listed
Catalogue Note
Painted in the late 1870s, Stevens' depiction of a fashionable young mother entranced with her baby boy in a well-to-do bourgeois interior is more than just a study in the comfortable life of the upper-classes of the time.
Seated on a round table and bathed in a pool of light, the boy appears to illuminate his surroundings, including his mother's face. With no clear origin for the light source, the reverence shown by the mother to the child takes on a Biblical significance, a reference further alluded to by the open doors behind, contemporary shorthand for the Annunciation. The implication is clear: this is not simply a portrait of a mother and child, but a modern day interpretation of a universal theme and the celebration of the very special bond that has existed between a mother and her infant for all eternity.
Stevens has treated the composition with his customary concerns for textures and surfaces. He delights in the description of the room and its rich draperies, paying special attention to the table cloth and the young mother's silk dress. He adds a further dimension to the composition both by painting the reflections in the large mirror in the left background of the composition and by depicting a garden through the open French windows.
The glimpse of green through the windows suggests that the work may have been been painted in Sainte Adresse. It was there that Stevens had been advised by his doctor to take the air as an antidote to the turpentine fumes that he suffered from in the confines of his Paris studio and which had been adversely affecting his health. As a consequence Stevens stayed in the town at regular intervals from around the time that the present work was painted. It was at Sainte Adresse that he also embarked on the series of seascapes that dominate his work in the last twenty years of his life, and it was in Sainte Adresse that the first owner of the present work lived.
A half-size version of the present oil on panel measuring 48.2 by 33cm. from the collection of Mrs George Dwight was sold at Christie's, London on 4 May 1973, lot 104.
Seated on a round table and bathed in a pool of light, the boy appears to illuminate his surroundings, including his mother's face. With no clear origin for the light source, the reverence shown by the mother to the child takes on a Biblical significance, a reference further alluded to by the open doors behind, contemporary shorthand for the Annunciation. The implication is clear: this is not simply a portrait of a mother and child, but a modern day interpretation of a universal theme and the celebration of the very special bond that has existed between a mother and her infant for all eternity.
Stevens has treated the composition with his customary concerns for textures and surfaces. He delights in the description of the room and its rich draperies, paying special attention to the table cloth and the young mother's silk dress. He adds a further dimension to the composition both by painting the reflections in the large mirror in the left background of the composition and by depicting a garden through the open French windows.
The glimpse of green through the windows suggests that the work may have been been painted in Sainte Adresse. It was there that Stevens had been advised by his doctor to take the air as an antidote to the turpentine fumes that he suffered from in the confines of his Paris studio and which had been adversely affecting his health. As a consequence Stevens stayed in the town at regular intervals from around the time that the present work was painted. It was at Sainte Adresse that he also embarked on the series of seascapes that dominate his work in the last twenty years of his life, and it was in Sainte Adresse that the first owner of the present work lived.
A half-size version of the present oil on panel measuring 48.2 by 33cm. from the collection of Mrs George Dwight was sold at Christie's, London on 4 May 1973, lot 104.