Alfred Stevens
Study of a Kneeling Boy Bending a Bow, for Dorchester House
(c.1860)
Tate
An exhibition of paintings and drawings by Alfred Stevens for the decoration of the dining room at Dorchester House, lent by Sir George Holford and Mr. Alfred Drury.
Alfred Stevens was born at Blandford, Dorset, 30 December 1817, son of a sign and heraldic painter. He left school between ten and eleven to help in his father’s workshop.
The Rector of Blandford St. Mary, Rev. Samuel Best, struck by his gift, aided his friends to send him for study to Italy, where he remained for nine years, receiving an extraordinary complete education in painting, sculpture, architectural design and ornament.
His great opportunity came in 1856 with a public competition for the Wellington Monument in St. Paul’s. Occupied as he was by the monument, he found time, however, to work on two other great projects: the decoration of St. Paul’s and the decoration of Dorchester House. Both remained projects only, nursed in scores of trial sketches and figure studies.
The commission for the work in Dorchester House was given by Mr. R.S. Holford in 1858; the house had recently been built on Italian Renaissance lines from designs by Lewis Vulliamy. The commission included the entire decoration and furnishing of the dining room. The ceiling and cove were to be painted with historical compositions.
Stevens’s source was the volume in Bohn’s Library containing a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s British History.
He began at the beginning of the legend with the two panels for the roof, The Judgement of Paris and Flight of Aeneas.
With this exhibition a model of the covering, with part of the design indicated, various drawings and a sketch-plan were added to the gallery scrap as evidence for the general arrangement; it was also possible to assign the cartoons and painted fragments to their places in the design.
