JOHN MITCHELL

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Alfred StevenS 3 La Villa des Falaises à Sainte-Adresse 1884 In a famous and prolific career, La Villa des Falaises à Sainte-Adresse today stands out as one of Alfred Stevens’ greatest achievements. Among the finest of all of his paintings, it is also perhaps his last great one. In the ambition of its composition and in the number of figures portrayed, La Villa des Falaises is certainly unique in Stevens’ work. It was painted on a single, imposing panel of mahogany: not only is it one of his largest known paintings on wood, but the durability of this support must account for its exceptional state of preservation. the subject matter of elegant families in an exclusive setting beside the sea is rich in allusion to both the society that Stevens kept, and to the emerging concept of leisure in contemporary france; it also neatly bridges his celebrated vocation in Paris as a painter of graceful women in exotic interiors and his later experience of ‘la vie balnéaire’ on the french coast at normandy and on the Côte d’Azur. the painting was done to order, and had to meet specific requirements regarding content, which, it is recorded, tested Stevens to the limit of his abilities; nonetheless, it was his triumph to carry off the commission with all of his very considerable skill and flair, with the result that the painting has the illusion of being effortless and spontaneous – as if the twin trials of the disposition of the figures and the demanding perspective had all been overcome in one impassioned session of work. the outcome was a painting that would have struck its new owners as pleasingly modern and, at the same time, wholly in keeping with a rich tradition in french art, that of outdoor scenes of recreation. ‘[Stevens] is pre-eminently the poet-painter of the fair sex, having immortalised the society lady of “the seventies” in a thousand graceful attitudes and with a never fading charm’. Ina Mary White in her ‘Preface’ to the english translation of Alfred Stevens’ Impressions sur la Peinture (1886), published in Aberdeen, 1904 as A Painter’s Philosophy
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JOHN MITCHELL

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