![Alfred Stevens - La Villa des Falaises à Sainte-Adresse [1884]](http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1550/25752429276_b8e2da9e77_o.jpg)
La Villa des Falaises à Sainte-Adresse today stands out as one of Alfred Stevens’ greatest achievements, and also perhaps his last major painting. In the ambition of its composition and in the number of figures portrayed, La Villa des Falaises is unique in Stevens’ oeuvre. The subject matter of elegant families in an exclusive seaside setting alludes to the society that Stevens kept and to the emerging concept of leisure in contemporary France; it also neatly bridges his celebrated vocation in Paris as a painter of graceful women in exotic interiors and his later experience of seaside life on the French coast at Normandy and on the Côte d’Azur.
The painting was done to order, and had to meet specific requirements regarding content which, it is recorded, tested Stevens’ abilities to the limit. Nonetheless, it was his triumph to carry off the commission with considerable skill and flair and the result is a painting that appears both effortless and spontaneous – as if the disposition of the figures and the demanding perspective had all been overcome in one impassioned session of work. The outcome was a painting that would have struck its new owners as pleasingly modern and, at the same time, wholly in keeping with a rich tradition in French art, that of outdoor scenes of recreation.
[Sotheby’s, New York - Oil on panel, 67.2 x 92 cm]