Julius LeBlanc Stewart

Alexander Brown (acquired directly from the artist, 1878)
Berry-Hill Galleries Inc., New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2000

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Fifteenth Annual Exhibition, 1879, no. 19 (lent by Alexander Brown)
Philadelphia, Art Club of Philadelphia, Loan exhibition of paintings and other objects of art from private collections in Philadelphia, January 25-February 7, 1892, no. 12 (lent by Alexander Brown)
Philadelphia, Union League of Philadelphia, Loan exhibition by the Union League of Philadelphia of Paintings by Prominent Artists Belonging to a few Citizens of Philadelphia, May 11-27, 1893, no. 92 (lent by Alexander Brown)

Edward Strahan, ed., The Art Treasures of America, Philadelphia, 1879, vol. III, p. 70, 72, illustrated; in the 1977 facsimile edition, vol. II, p. 136, illustrated p. 138
Ulrich W. Hiesinger, Julius LeBlanc Stewart, American Painter of the Belle Époque, New York, 1998, p. 24, 25, 126, illustrated p. 24 (the drawing after the painting, recorded as untraced)

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting is beautifully presented and is in lovely condition. The painting is clean and should be hung in its current state. The canvas has a good glue lining. There is a very faint pattern of raised cracking, particularly in the lower right, but this is certainly not disturbing or unstable. There is very slight thinness in the profiles of the trees against the sky on either side of the performer on the left. There are no retouches of any note.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Julius Stewart expatriated with his family from Philadelphia to Paris in 1865.  As a youth, his entrée to the ateliers of the city’s most famous artists was eased by his father William Hood Stewart (1820-1892), a wealthy businessman who held one of the most important contemporary collections of the nineteenth century. Stewart became a student of Eduoardo Zamacoîs, later entering the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme, followed by study with Raimundo de Madrazo, and this training, both academic and informal, would have a lasting influence on his style no matter how modern the subject of his paintings became.  He made his debut at the Paris Salon of 1878, earning an early reputation that surpassed fellow Americans painting in Paris, including John Singer Sargent. Critics praised the artist’s facility for informal portraiture, the delicacy with which he rendered the most fashionable costumes, and the very chicness of his subjects.  One such painting, After the Ball (1877) was quickly purchased by Anthony J. Drexel, a frequent visitor to Paris, while fellow Philadelphian and banker Alexander Brown acquired The Mountebank, which he lent to exhibitions over the next several years (the two men likely knew the Stewarts, given their similar business and social circles) (Hiesinger, p. 24).

While Stewart’s early paintings often featured a single, fashionable figure, The Mountebank is among Stewart’s first major complex works. In an expansive, frieze-like composition, the artist presents an assembly of members of a well-dressed family at lesiure on a sun-drenched terrace as they bemusedly watch the antics of travelling costumed performers and their trick-goats (given the subject, the painting has also been known as Le Saltimbanque).  When viewing the work in Brown’s collection, the critic Edward Strahan noted in his Art Treasures of America that the man with the newspaper in his lap was the artist’s father, while additional study suggests the woman with a fan is most probably his mother Ellen, and the setting was likely the family villa in Cannes (Hiesinger, p. 25). Strahan believed that “by choosing a little incident to focus the attention of the personages, and giving each character the movement and vivacity of life, the painter achieves a scene of genre valuable for its own sake as well as for the likeliness included” (Strahan, facsimile edition, p. 136).  Indeed, the pretext of an audience watching a show afforded Stewart an opportunity to carefully describe the various expressions of each viewer, as much on display as the performers before them. Strahan’s always-keen eye also detected a connection between Stewart’s brilliant ability to record every detail of the “bric-a-brac of modern luxury” and the Spanish painters, like Fortuny, whose work his father had collected.  The Mountebank also revels the influence of the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens (see lots 25, 30, 32, and 34), almost twenty years Stewart’s senior (and also actively collected by his father). 

Following the success of The Mountebank, Stewart continued to use an expansive, horizontal format in his masterworks of the 1880s, which likewise afforded glimpses of light-hearted social affairs recorded in painstaking detail —his insider status allowing him a unique perspective of the life of high society and the title “the Parisian from Philadelphia.”