The Victorian Age

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

Occasionally he received a commission for a painting, and his noble portrait of Mrs Mary Ann Collmann at the National Gallery, was painted in 1854, the lady being the wife of an architect, Leonard Collmann, who sometimes employed Stevens.

In 1850 Stevens began the chief work of his life with his competition model for the Wellington Monument. Originally he was placed only sixth in the competition and awarded a prize of £100, but fortunately on further consideration the superior merit and appropriateness of his design was perceived and the commission for the monument was definitely given to Stevens. For the remaining seventeen years of his life the artist was at work on this monument, which was all but completed at his death, with the exception of the crowning equestrian statue of the Duke, which, by a strange caprice, was ruled out by the Dean because he did not like the idea of a horse in a church! Eventually this pedantic objection was overruled, and the equestrian statue, carried out from Steven’s model, was placed in position as recently as 1911, so that the whole monument as conceived by Stevens may now be seen in St Pauls. Other memorials of the genius of Stevens in St Paul’s are the four mosaics of Prophets in the spandrels under the dome, which he designed in 1862. The original cartoon for the mosaic of ‘Isaiah’ is now in the Tate Gallery, and nothing equal to it can be found nearer than the Sistine Chapel at Rome. Concurrently with these great masterpieces, Stevens worked at the decoration of Dorchester House, Park Lane, where he completed for Mr Holford two chimney-pieces, a buffet, and other features, and designed a painted ceiling, the whole being a scheme of unequalled splendor in English interior decoration. Worn out by the strain of his monument and his severe battle with life, Alfred Stevens died on May 1, 1875, in the house he had designed and built for himself at 9 Eaton Villas, Haverstock Hill. Apart from the works already mentioned, only a few fragments remain of the art of Alfred Stevens, but while we must always deplore that more opportunities were not given to so great and various an artist, enough exists to prove to all time the measure of his genius.

The Victorian Age (continued)