Moonlight (Au clair de la lune)

Alfred Stevens was a Belgian painter based in Paris who became one of the most celebrated painters of fashionable women in the Second Empire and Third Republic — his elegant depictions of Parisian women in their interiors were enormously commercially successful. His 'Moonlight' (1885) represents the nocturnal outdoor subject within his typically indoor practice — a woman in moonlight engaging the atmospheric conditions he could transform into a vehicle for the same feminine elegance he depicted in his interior subjects. Stevens was deeply connected to the Impressionist circle despite maintaining his own more polished manner.

Stevens renders the moonlit subject with his characteristic technical refinement — the cool blue-white of moonlight on the female figure handled with the same care he brought to candlelight or gaslight in his interior subjects. His ability to convey the quality of different lighting conditions through precise palette and tonal management was one of his most admired technical accomplishments. The outdoor nocturne setting gives his feminine subject an unusual atmospheric frame.