Alfred Stevens : Master Of Design, 1817-75

The first book on the English sculptor, designer, and painter Alfred Stevens

Few people were aware of Alfred Stevens's art during his lifetime (1817–1875), but following his early death while still at work on the Wellington Monument in St Paul's Cathedral, this changed. There was a furious outcry that a man of such genius should have been treated so harshly by the Office of Works during the protracted course of that project. As a result of a campaign, largely led by fellow artists, he became widely known, and between then and the outbreak of the Second World War he was hailed as one of greatest Humanist artists Britain had ever known, a judgement largely based on his grander works of figurative art and his superb draughtsmanship. But then, with the rise of Modernism in the early twentieth century, he came to be seen as someone who had merely aped the art of the Italian Renaissance. His work was dismissed as the last gasp of a movement that was now dead.

What those who extolled his work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as well as those who denigrated it in the years that followed, failed to see, however, was that he was a great innovator, someone who had played a crucial part in the development of British art in the nineteenth century. This was achieved in two ways: on the one hand, by designing objects such as stoves, painted decoration, and monumental sculpture whose form was linked to that of the surrounding architecture, he pointed the way to the New Sculpture that was to emerge at the end of the century; on the other, by blurring the line that was then universally drawn between "fine" and "decorative" art, he acted as a precursor of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

The study of his work has been hampered by the paucity of documents, scattered in archives in England and Italy, which is one reason why there has been no monograph since Hugh Stannus's Alfred Stevens (1891).