At the Railway Station

Alfred Stevens · c. 1874

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

64.8 × 47 cm (25 1/2 × 18 1/2 in.); Framed: 79.4 × 62.3 × 10.2 cm (31 1/4 × 24 1/2 × 4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Alfred Stevens's *At the Railway Station* captures a farewell with the quiet emotional weight that made him one of the most admired painters of modern Parisian life in the 1870s. Stevens was a Belgian-born artist who built his career in Paris, becoming celebrated for his ability to render fashionable women in moments of ordinary — yet charged — feeling. His technique on panel is notably refined: smooth, layered brushwork that gives fabrics their particular lustre and faces their subtle expressiveness. Where many of his contemporaries chased the bold gesture, Stevens preferred restraint, finding drama in a glance, a tilt of the head, the clutch of a gloved hand. He was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts and counted Édouard Manet among his close friends, a relationship that likely sharpened both men's interest in depicting contemporary life with unsentimental honesty. The work now resides in the Art Institute of Chicago's permanent collection, where it is regarded as a fine example of his ability to transform an everyday public setting into a scene of private emotional consequence. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on the same panel format Stevens used, allowing the painter to honour his characteristic surface quality and the delicate tonal modelling that no print can replicate.