Julius LeBlanc Stewart 1855 - 1919

William Hood Stewart (the artist's father), Paris, France (sold: The American Art Association, New York, Collection of the Late W.H. Stewart, February 4, 1898, lot 123)
W.A. Genner (acquired at the above sale)
Sold: Sotheby's, New York, December 6, 1984, lot 135 (as Summer's Promenade)
Alexander Gallery, New York (acquired at the above sale)
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1985

Paris, France, Paris Salon, 1882, no. 2494 (as L'Eté)
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art; San Francisco, California, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Arts, American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection, June 1989-May 1990, no. 56, p. 152, illustrated p. 153
New York, Vance Jordan Fine Art, Julius LeBlanc Stewart: American Painter of the Belle Époque, October-December 1998, pp. 25-26, illustrated pl. 6, pp. 78-79
Memphis, Tennessee, The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Celebrate America: 19th Century Paintings from the Manoogian Collection, February-April 1999, no. 45, p. 108, illustrated p. 109
Grand Rapids, Michigan, Grand Rapids Art Museum, American Masters: The Manoogian Collection Part II: Impressionists at Home and Abroad, May-August 2001
Midland, Michigan, Midland Center for the Arts, Exquisite Moments in American Painting: Works from the Manoogian Collection, July-September 2003
Naples, Florida, Naples Museum of Art, Impressions: American Painters in France, January-May 2007

D. Dodge Thompson, "Julius L. Stewart, a Parisian from Philadelphia," The Magazine Antiques, November 1986, p. 1046, illustrated
Kevin Sharp, Summer Leisure in the Gilded Age: American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection, Chicago, Illinois, 2005, no. 21, illustrated

Julius Stewart’s family moved from Philadelphia to Paris in 1865 where they joined a large circle of expatriate Americans immersed in the arts.  Stewart’s father, William Hood Stewart (1820-1892), was a wealthy businessman who built one of the most important contemporary art collections of the nineteenth century. His father’s renown as a collector allowed the young Stewart easy access to the ateliers of the city’s most famous artists.  He studied under the Spanish painters Eduardo Zamacoîs and Raimundo de Madrazo, and with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux Arts. Stewart’s work reveals the influence not only of his academic instructors, but also of artists such as Alfred Stevens who were represented in his father’s prominent collection.

Beginning in 1878, Stewart exhibited annually at the Paris Salon, and critics praised his facility for informal portraiture, the delicacy with which he rendered the most fashionable costumes, and the very chicness of his subjects, earning him the sobriquet “a Parisian from Philadelphia.” While Stewart’s early paintings often depicted a single figure in an interior, beginning in the late 1870s he undertook a series of large-scale compositions featuring the fashionable lifestyle of his family and coterie of society friends.  Ulrich Hiesinger writes of the present work, "The long rectangular format...was repeated in another composition of 1880 titled Summer, which portrays a small company of people—two women in the foreground and an older couple at the rear with a young boy—strolling through the countryside on a sparkling summer day.  The scene is thought to represent members of the Stewart family for the artist’s father preserved the canvas in his own collection as the only example of his son’s work.  Summer, which already attests to a good deal of experience in outdoor work, was the first in an intermittent series of figured landscapes that the artist produced" (Julius LeBlanc Stewart: American Painter of the Belle Époque, New York, 1998, p. 25).