The Parisian Sphinx

The Parisian Sphinx is an oil-on-canvas painting by Belgian painter Alfred Stevens. Painted between 1875 and 1877, it depicts a dreamy young woman (or aristocratic demi-monde) gently supporting her head with her hand. The painting is part of the permanent collection of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The Parisian Sphinx shows the influence of Vermeer and the other Netherlandish old masters on Stevens, and testifies to the Symbolist influence in the latter's day. It incorporates a harmonious juxtaposition of superficial Dutch realism with the spreading Symbolist manner, as opposed to the bottom-up, pluralistic symbolism of the declining Romanticism.

Beside being renowned for its realism and luminism, The Parisian Sphinx has been described as enigmatic. Critics agree in that the apparently realistic painting conceals a hidden meaning. Many point to the "hidden dangers behind feminine tenderness", and to the figure of the femme fatale.

Alfred Stevens was born in Brussels on May 11, 1823. He received his training in the Brussels studio of François-Joseph Navez, a successful Belgian portraitist. Stevens belonged to the generation of Joseph Lies, Jean Pierre François Lamorinière and Liévin De Winne. He received his training together with Charles de Groux and Jan Frans Portaels. Alfred Stevens and his brothers grew up with their grandfather, who ran the popular Brussels cafe de l'amitié. The latter was an intellectual gathering place of progressionists and dissenters. Stevens' aversion to history painting was manifested in his reaction to the current heroic romance of his time. He later wrote: "the historical subject was invented when people stopped being interested in painting itself." Two constants permeated both his upbringing and his later oeuvre: realism in his art and bourgeois materialism in his lifestyle.

It was Camille Roqueplan who persuaded Stevens to move to Paris, which he did in 1851. His brothers also moved to Paris: Joseph Stevens became a celebrated Belgian animal painter and Arthur Stevens, who was a critic, was the best advertisement for the brother painters. Alfred grew into a Parisian society that had mastered fashion genre painting for almost twenty years. After initially focusing on realistic, socially motivated works (1844), around 1855 he increasingly turned to the depiction of chic middle-class ladies. He depicted them all with their intricate hairstyles, colorful clothes and finery in genre pieces in which he captured a fleeting mood—he sadness of a farewell, the emotion of a letter, the rustle of a silk dress. Each atmospheric painting is packed with wealth and luxury.

The Second Empire was a very bourgeois and prosperous period in which Stevens became the chronicler par excellence of the demi-mondaines, making his name in Paris as a painter of beautifully dressed ladies. Unlike Franz Xaver Winterhalter, the official portraitist of the French imperial family and Steven's main rival in the genre, Stevens chose his models from among the wealthy upper classes. The demi-mondaines were maintained by their well-to-do lovers and often had nothing to do at all. They read books, waited for their lovers to return, made themselves up and passed their time in salons, exhibitions and seaside towns.

His fascination for the female figure in art is evidenced by one of the 360 aphorisms in Steven's Impressions sur la peinture. In it he states: "The glance of a woman has more charm than the most beautiful landscape or seascape, and is more beautiful than a ray of sunlight." His choice of bourgeois ladies was unprecedented. Female figures were more likely to play a mythological or historical role in painting. However, Stevens showed them as precious objects in richly decorated environments. His paintings, in which he usually depicted lone women, are often a confluence of individual portraitures and types. Individual women disappeared behind their fashionable clothes and stereotypical attitudes. It gave his paintings a hint of theatricality and false sensibility. The female models of Stevens' paintings were described by Joris-Karl Huysmans as des petites femmes, qui ne sont plus des flamandes et qui ne seront jamais des Parisiennes. The graceful postures and elegant bodies are French, yet the women are more reminiscent of (stereotypical) Flanders. Stevens' characters often have strong facial features with a wide chin and short, sturdy arms and hands.

In 1863 Stevens was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor . A year later, Gustave Moreau achieved great success at the Paris Salon with his mythological Oedipus and the Sphinx. He painted the sphinx as a monster with a lion's body and a woman's head and breasts. The sphinx was a very popular topos, one of the most common symbols of lust in the nineteenth century.

In 1884 a friend of Steven's, the transgressive Baudelaire (who dedicated a poem to Stevens' brother Joseph and initially praised Alfred, although later, in an unpublished work, he condescendingly described him as a 'Flemish painter' because of the Flemings' excellence in the imitation of nature) opposed the neoclassicism paradigm and defended his transgressive decadentism, stating: "Littérature de décadence! Paroles vides de sens que nous entendons souvent tomber, avec la sonorité d’un bâillement emphatique, de la bouche de ces sphinx sans énigme qui veillent devant les portes saintes de l’Esthétique classique"