Julius Leblanc Stewart 1855-1919

Galerie Andre Watteau, Paris, France
Craig and Tarlton, Inc., Raleigh, North Carolina (acquired from the above)
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1973

Paris Salon, 1899
New York, New York Cultural Center; Minneapolis, Minnesota, Minneapolis Institute of Art; Houston, Texas, The University of Houston Fine Arts Center, The Sarah Blaffer Campbell Gallery, Nude in American Art, 1975
Charlotte, North Carolina, Mint Museum of Art and traveling, American Paintings, The Landon Collection, September 1979-July 1981, no. 34
Charlotte, North Carolina, Mint Museum of Art, Classical Taste in America 1800-1840, November 1993-March 1994
Charlotte, North Carolina, Mint Museum of Art, North Carolina Collects, July-September 1994, illustrated
Charlottesville, Virginia, University of Virginia Art Museum, A Jeffersonian Ideal: Selections from the Dr. and Mrs. Henry C. Landon III Collection of American Fine and Decorative Arts, August-November 2005, p. 60, illustrated in color p. 61

Ulrich Hiesinger, Julius LeBlanc Stewart: American Painter of the Belle Epoque, New York, 1988, p. 60

Very good condition; unlined; under UV: fine.
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Julius LeBlanc Stewart was born in Philadelphia in 1855 but moved to Paris at the age of ten and remained there for the majority of his life.  His father, William Hood Stewart, had inherited a profitable Cuban sugar plantation and invested his money in fashionable nineteenth century academic art, including works by Spanish school artists like Mario Fortuny, Eduardo Zamacois and Raimundo de Madrazo. Stewart likely trained with at least the latter two artists in his teenage years. At eighteen, he began studying under Jean-Léon Gérôme, the French academic painter, and emerged as one of his favorite pupils. Stewart regularly exhibited in the salons of Paris, as well as the world exhibitions held in Munich, Vienna, Berlin, Venice, and Brussels. Because of his father's wealth, Stewart moved easily among the circles of the socially elite expatriates in Paris and it was his grand paintings of this leisure class that launched his reputation in the 1880s.

By the 1890s, as the expatriate Paris social scene waned, Stewart shifted his focus away from his portraits of elegant society women and devoted himself to painting the nude.   While his earliest nudes were set in pastoral landscapes, his later compositions took on the expected armature of classical mythology. Mythological scenes were accepted subjects in the Salon exhibitions and by 1899, all seven of Stewart's Paris Salon entries, including Les Chasseureuses, were cloaked with mythological references. One contemporary critic noted of Les Chasseuresses following its appearance at the Salon: "His nymphs are none other than the pretty Parisian girls he knew so well how to dress, and that he undresses today with the same talent" (Julius LeBlanc Stewart, p. 60).

Les Chasseuresuses (or The Huntresses) is based on the Greek myth of Artemis, Zeus's daughter who asked her father to permit her eternal chastity. Stewart followed classic art historical convention and portrayed Artemis as a maiden huntress, surrounded by her hounds and maiden nymphs who accompany and protect her.  She stands stoically at the left with two seated attendants as nymphs dance, their gauzy dresses blowing in the breeze. In Les Chasseuresses, Stewart has deemphasized the hunt, and the fête of the late nineteenth century has turned into an Arcadian celebration in the dappled sunlight of a meadow.