Alfred Stevens was a Belgian painter best known for his elegant, realistic portraiture of fashionable society women. Born Alfred Émile Leopold Joseph Victor Stevens on March 11, 1823 in Brussels, Belgium, the artist studied at both the Académie Royale des-Beaux-Arts in his hometown and the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he learned the fundamentals of classical sculpture and life drawing. His naturalistic style developed from viewing works by Dutch masters such as Gabriel Metsu and Gerard ter Borch, adopting a smooth rendering technique in oil paint that lent itself particularly well to capturing the fine clothes of his bourgeois sitters. Beginning in 1851, Stevens exhibited regularly at salons and his artworks were popular with collectors at the time—1857 marked his first important sale of Consolation (1857) for 6,000 francs. A year before his death on August 24, 1906 in Paris, France, Stevens was the only living artist to exhibit in a Brussels retrospective of Belgian art.