Julius LeBlanc Stewart (American, French, 1855 to 1919)
Julius LeBlanc Stewart was born in Philadelphia in 1855 but moved to Paris at the age of ten and remained there for the majority of his life. His father, William Hood Stewart, had inherited a profitable Cuban sugar plantation and invested his money in fashionable nineteenth century academic art, including works by Spanish school artists like Mario Fortuny, Eduardo Zamacois and Raimundo de Madrazo.
Stewart likely trained with at least the latter two artists in his teenage years. At eighteen, he began studying under Jean-Leon Gerome, the French academic painter, and emerged as one of his favorite pupils. Stewart regularly exhibited in the salons of Paris, as well as the world exhibitions held in Munich, Vienna, Berlin, Venice, and Brussels. Because of his father’s wealth, Stewart moved easily among the circles of the socially elite expatriates in Paris and it was his grand paintings of this leisure class that launched his reputation in the 1880s.
By the 1890s, as the expatriate Paris social scene waned, Stewart shifted his focus away from his portraits of elegant society women and devoted himself to painting the nude. While his earliest nudes were set in pastoral landscapes, his later compositions took on the expected armature of classical mythology. Mythological scenes were accepted subjects in the Salon exhibitions and by 1899, all seven of Stewart’s Paris Salon entries, including Les Chasseureuses, were cloaked with mythological references.
One contemporary critic noted of Les Chasseuresses following its appearance at the Salon: “His nymphs are none other than the pretty Parisian girls he knew so well how to dress, and that he undresses today with the same talent” (Julius LeBlanc Stewart, p. 60).
Information courtesy of Sotheby’s New York, December 2008.