The Japanese Robe
The Belgian artist Alfred Stevens is believed to have painted this image of an auburn-haired woman standing before a mirror around 1872. The same model has been identified elsewhere as his sister-in-law. She wears a blue floral kimono and holds a Japanese uchiwa flat fan. The scene stems from the artist’s fascination with both Japanese art and design and Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting, in which the motif of a solitary woman gazing into a mirror proliferated. The work was commissioned by the Met’s early patron Catharine Lorillard Wolfe after another version of the composition (1872, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Liège).
Artwork Details
- Title: The Japanese Robe
- Artist: Alfred Stevens (Belgian, Brussels 1823–1906 Paris)
- Date: ca. 1872
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 36 1/2 x 25 1/8 in. (92.7 x 63.8 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887
- Object Number: 87.15.56
- Curatorial Department: European Paintings
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