The Artist: The Belgian painter Alfred Stevens (not to be confused with the English sculptor of the same name) was born into an art-loving family in Brussels in 1823. His father collected works by French painters of the period, including Eugène Delacroix, and his grandparents owned a café popular with artists and writers, where the young Stevens and his brothers spent much time. His older brother, Joseph, became known as an animal painter, while his younger brother, Arthur, was an art critic, dealer, and adviser. Young Alfred studied art with François Joseph Navez (1787–1869), the leading Belgian Neoclassical painter and a follower of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825), in his hometown in the early 1840s. He moved to Paris in 1844 to train under the French Romantic painter Camille-Joseph-Etienne Roqueplan (1803–1855) and soon switched to work under Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. His first Salon entry in 1853 was bought by the French government for a museum in Marseille.
Much of his early production was devoted to social realism. Soon, though, Stevens shifted toward images of fashionable young women in interiors, which brought him broad success, alongside more freely painted coastal scenes following Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) and Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819–1891). In 1867, he won a first-class medal at the Exposition Universelle, where he had exhibited eighteen paintings. In Belgium, his work was quickly embraced by both King Léopold and the state museums. His friendships with Edouard Manet and James McNeill Whistler, accompanied by his early embrace of Japanese culture and objects, had a defining effect on the
Japoniste tendencies of his more avant-garde painter-friends. In his pivotal essay “The New Painting,” critic Edmond Duranty noted the talented Stevens’s inclusion in the Impressionist movement and his common appellation among his compatriots as the ”man of modernity.”[1] Stevens and his wife, Marie, held regular Wednesday salons at their home that were frequented by their friends Gustave Courbet, Thomas Couture, Carolus-Duran, Edgar Degas, Eva Gonzalès, Henri Fantin-Latour, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Berthe Morisot, Manet, and Whistler, among others. In 1900, he was honored as the first living artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and he died soon thereafter, in 1906.
The Painting: A young woman with blue eyes and auburn hair delicately pinned back in loops of braids examines herself in a large gilt-edged wooden-framed mirror. She stands at three-quarter view with her back to the viewer, so that her face and the front of her body are only visible in the reflection. There, too, we can see more of the red-walled room in which she stands. At right, a gilt-edged high-backed chair and the cream-toned door decorated with gold paint beyond it, as well as, at left, the large green vase filled with tall decorative items that appear to be dried pinecones and pampas grass all provide the sense of the setting as an upper bourgeois home.[2] The picture’s protagonist wears a long maritime blue floral Japanese kimono, belted on her left side with a bright red, white, and navy blue floral
obi, a sash usually wrapped and tied at the back to keep a kimono closed, but only loosely tied here at her side. Underneath her kimono, a white peignoir peeks out at the model’s low neckline. She wears what appears to be a large diamond-encircled sapphire ring on her left fourth finger, signaling to the viewer that the sitter is either an engaged or married woman. On her right arm is a wide golden bangle, and on that hand, a ring. In her right hand, she holds an upside-down Japanese bamboo-framed
washi paper
uchiwa flat fan decorated with a fanciful figure dressed in black and white with a red bowtie seated on a red mat.[3] With barely delineated features, the figure may have horns and represent a white-and-black furred animal, but any firm identification is difficult.
This painting was commissioned from Stevens by the great early Met patron Catharine Lorillard Wolfe and bequeathed to the museum upon her death in 1887. Coles (1977) dates the picture to about 1872, along with its cognate at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Liège (on which see below). Munsterberg (1974), who had erroneously suggested a date between 1880 and 1887 for The Met’s picture, suggested that the model is the same as in
Le bouquet effeuillé (The Tattered Bouquet), also known as
Ophélie (Ophelia) (ca. 1865–67, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels), who was identified in 1900 by Count Robert de Montesquiou as Stevens’s sister-in-law.[4]
Cognates Among Stevens’s Paintings: Another version of this painting with a different model in an identical pose and very similar costume and hairstyle is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Liège (see fig. 1 above). While the kimono the model wears in the Liège painting is identical, the
obi is different; instead of the panes of patterned navy blue and red separated by white borders found on the sash in The Met’s picture, the Liège
obi has a red and green overall floral pattern, set against a light sage green background. The fan the model holds in the Liège painting differs from that in The Met’s picture in that it seems to be made of a translucent, lighter-weight fabric, unstructured by any bamboo framework, and cropped rather radically in the painting. Any sense of recession in space beyond the immediate vicinity of the model visible in the mirror, as in The Met’s picture, is curtailed by a gold-ground floral screen and a large celadon vase (very similar to that in The Met’s painting), here filled with what appear to be tall climbing light pink Japanese camellias. The most striking element of the Liège picture is the model’s red hair, pinned back in a similar style to that found on the model in
The Japanese Robe, though with more fanciful, colorful hairpins on the Liège redhead.
A pastel three-quarter length variation,
At the Mirror, was sold at Christie's, London, in 1987, and again in 1989. Several other works by Stevens explore the theme of the mirror, including
Young Girl Looking at Herself in a Mirror (ca. 1875–80, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam),
La Visite (sale, Christie’s, 2002), and
The Psyché (ca. 1871, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey).
Northern Baroque and Contemporary Precedents: The theme of the woman alone whose face is reflected in the mirror for the viewer to see, either doubling the (presumed male) viewer’s chances to glimpse her beautiful face or, often, only seen in the mirror reflection, derives from Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century prototypes. Stevens was highly aware of these precedents in his construction of such genre pictures as
The Japanese Robe. Among the earlier Dutch artists to whom Stevens would have looked for inspiration were Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), Gerard ter Borch the Younger (1617–1681) and Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684). For example, The Met’s own ter Borch
A Young Woman at her Toilet with a Maid (ca. 1650–51, The Met
17.190.10) provides a similar subject of a woman at her toilette who regards herself in a mirror while dressed in a gleaming satin fabric and while surrounded by a glinting silver pitcher and metal accoutrements that also reflect the light, showcasing the painter’s virtuoso achievement in his craft. Stevens’s contemporaries noted the similarities with the Dutch master, as Stevens earned the nickname the “Terborch of France.” For his part, Stevens referred to the Dutch and Flemish masters as “the best painters in the world.”[5]
Closer to Stevens’s time and produced by a friend of his, Gustave Courbet’s
Jo, La Belle Irlandaise (1865–66, The Met
29.100.63) served as a contemporary precedent for this kind of self-reflective subject. Here, though, unlike in the example by Courbet, the artist shares with the viewer the reflection in the mirror. Historically, the use of the mirror to either extend the space on view (as in Velázquez’s
Las Meninas [1656, Museo del Prado, Madrid] and Stevens’s own later
In the Studio [1888, The Met
1986.339.2]) or to double the image in reverse, as here, has a long tradition in painting and usually relates to the idea of displaying the painter’s virtuosity. In addition to the use of a mirror-image, in The Met’s painting, aspects of the picture that contribute to the viewer’s image of the artist as highly-skilled include: reflections on the green vase at left, the perfectly captured floral pattern of the kimono, the textural painting of the
uchiwa, and the depiction of the model’s hair as smooth and reflective.[6] One art historian compared the Liège version of this scene to Vermeer’s
Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1663/65, Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen, Berlin) in their protagonists’ shared display of “self-absorbed self-interest.”[7]
Stevens, the Japoniste: That same writer noted that the model in the Liège picture is dressed in the most current Japanese taste. It is fitting that Stevens would opt to depict his sitter in a sumptuous blue silk kimono while carrying a Japanese fan, two accoutrements that the artist most likely kept in his studio to be worn by various models in the 1870s (for example, models for both the Liège and Met pictures, as well as the model for
Une femme à fenêtre (The Blue Kimono) (ca. 1871–72, sale, Christie’s, New York, 2022), who may well be the same as the model for The Met’s painting, with a very similar hairstyle). The painter’s
Meditation, or
The Japanese Robe (ca. 1872, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston),
Yamatori (1878, sale, Christie’s, New York, 2013),
L'attente (location unknown),
Femme assise à la Japonaise (ca. 1874, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington), and
La femme de l'artiste assise dans un jardin (private collection, Kent) also exhibit Japanese robes. It is notable that the title of The Met’s picture is ”The Japanese Robe”; the canvas is named after the central object depicted rather than the central figure. With this title in mind, we can see both that the model is treated more like a fashion model, whose garments are the intended focus, and that the signification of Japanese objects was uppermost in Stevens’s mind.
Stevens’ collecting of Japanese art and objects had begun in the late 1850s, and his house in Montmartre, purchased in 1871, included a room of Asian decorative arts.[8] His social circle included such fervent
japonistes as the printmaker Félix Bracquemond (who discovered Hokusai’s
manga in a print shop in 1856), writers Edmond de Goncourt and Philippe Burty, and painters James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet, among others. With the increasing craze for Japanese art and objects in bourgeois residences,
japoniste trinkets flooded Parisian shops and department stores. The fashionable interiors Stevens depicted often included these objects from large Japanese screens to tiny
netsuke. In
The Japanese Robe, the garment worn by the model takes the place of those bibelots of fashion. Later examples such as Monet’s
La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume) (1876, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 56.147) and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre’s
Une Japonaise (The Language of the Fan) (1882, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk) prove how widespread Western (and specifically Parisian) artists’ appropriation of the kimono had become, from avant-garde to academic painters. While Stevens and these others were specific in their translation of these kimonos to paint, a more nuanced understanding of Japanese—let alone any Asian—arts would have to await the greater cultural sensitivity of the late twentieth century.
Jane R. Becker 2024
[1] Translated in Charles S. Moffett et al.,
The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, exh. cat. (Washington: National Gallery of Art and tour, 1986), p. 42. While this association may seem surprising to some, as Gloria Groom has noted, “these artists represented not opposite camps but rather two sides of modernity connected by an interest in contemporary fashion.” See Groom in Groom, ed.,
Impressionism, Fashion, & Modernity, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée d’Orsay and tour, 2012), pp. 36–37.
[2] I am grateful to my colleague Ashley Dunn for this identification of pampas grass. The artist clearly kept a ready supply in his own studio of pampas grass, as well as such Japanese-sourced objects as parasols to be used as props, as represented in his portrait
Camille Lemonnier dans l’atelier du peintre (Camille Lemonnier in the Painter’s Studio) (Fondation Roi Baudouin, long-term loan to the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels) and, for the
Japoniste objects, in The Met’s own
In the Studio (
1986.339.2).
[3] While this less rounded fan is a somewhat unusual shape among Japanese fans found depicted in European painting, approximately four years later, Stevens’s friend Claude Monet reproduced a fan of the same shape at top left of his own
La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume) (1876, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 56.147). The
uchiwa is the traditional accoutrement when wearing a kimono.
[4] Comte Robert de Montesquiou, “Alfred Stevens,”
Gazette des Beaux-Arts 23 (1900), p. 116.
[5] Alfred Stevens,
Impressions sur la peinture, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1896), quoted in translation by Saskia de Bodt, “Alfred Stevens and the Dutch masters,” in
Alfred Stevens: 1823–1906 (as in Derrey-Capon 2009), p. 145.
[6] Not all viewers were taken in by these elements in Stevens’s work. On March 18, 1878, the artist and fashion designer Felicien Rops wrote to his friend the Belgian writer Edmond Picard with Stevens’s painting in mind: “Above all, I wish to paint our era. When I say that a painter must be of his times, I believe that he must especially paint character before painting outfits and accessories. I will never be persuaded that a lady (in a yellow dress) reading a letter, a demoiselle (in a blue dress) contemplating a Japanese figurine, that any fine person (in a velvet dress) admiring herself in a mirror, constitutes the most palpitating and most interesting aspects of modernity—all the more so as there is not one of them who was captured on canvas unawares, but rather each was brought to the studio at one hundred sous a session and dressed in the yellow, blue, pink, white, or velvet dress to represent the Society Lady for those who have never seen one. On the other hand, I allow that the dresses are marvels of execution—but modern life, modernity—where is it?” See Gérald Basseporte,
Regards sur Félicién Rops: Peintre à essonnes, pp. 151–53, cited in Françoise Tétart-Vittu, “Shops versus Department Stores,” in Gloria Groom, ed.,
Impressionism, Fashion, & Modernity, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2012), pp. 214, 217.
[7] Michael Marrinan,
Gustave Caillebotte: Painting the Paris of Naturalism, 1872–1887 (Los Angeles, 2016), p. 31.
[8] The room was described as a Japanese salon by Edmond de Goncourt, but as Chinese by Max Sulzberger. See Sarah Lees, “Alfred Stevens and the Arts of Asia,”
Burlington Magazine 157 (January 2015), p. 14. It was typical of the time that even some of the most cosmopolitan Parisians would confuse and conflate the two cultures.
