Belgian 1823-1906 & French 1852-1929
Monogrammed lower right: “AS” and stamped “Histoire du siècle Stevens & Gervex 1889”
This work is a study performed in preparation for Alfred Steven’s and Henri Gervex’s collaborative work Histoire du siècle, a massive panorama completed in 1889 for the Universal Exposition in Paris. It showed all of the notable figures of the previous one hundred years in French history, and the Comite Alfred Stevens has two opinions as to the identity of the woman in this study: judging by the clothing, it could be Marquise of Massa, illustrated in the panorama within the period of 1870-1878; or it could simply be an anonymous elegantly-dressed figure for this same period.
The following is an excerpt from Mark Levitch’s Panthéon de la Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War, a very large mural similar in many ways to History of the Century:
The Panthéon’s most important predecessor compositionally and conceptually was the History of the Century, a panoramic painting by Henri Gervex and Alfred Stevens that was completed for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris marking the centennial of the French Revolution (for which exposition Carrier-Belleuse had produced a panorama on the life of Joan of Arc). Gervex and Stevens were probably the most respected painters to have undertaken a panorama, and their portrait-based History of the Century differed significantly from earlier panoramic efforts, which had almost invariably featured either spectacular historic events (often battles) or landscapes. Instead, the History of the Century was essentially a collection of full-length portraits fantastically grouped in a single place, as the Panthéon later would be. Gervex and Stevens arrayed more than 640 notable figures from the previous one hundred years of French history against arcades, terraces, and steps of the Tuileries, which provided a perfect setting for groups of figures.
The Panthéon would use a similar, albeit imaginary, architectural framework to structure its thousands of portraits. Capturing resemblance was critical for Gervex and Stevens, and the artists relied both on direct posing and on photographs, just as Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet would twenty-five years later. Conceptually, too, the Panthéon was heir to the 1889 panorama, for the History of the Century was what Stephan Oettermann, in his history of painted panoramas, has called a “post-photographic painting,” which he defines as one whose “conception depended on the existence of photography and the public’s familiarity with it.”
Panthéon de la Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War, Mark Levitch, pg. 33-34
