STEVENS, Alfred

English sculptor, designer, and painter, the son of a decorator. He was encouraged by a clergyman who lent him things to copy, so that at 15 he was a competent portraitist in the Reynolds tradition. His patron collected £60 and approached Landseer, but Landseer's premium for an apprenticeship was £500, so in 1833 the boy was put on a ship for Naples. No arrangements had been made for him and no further funds were provided; he knew no Italian, got involved in political intrigues, and fell among thieves. He spent eighteen months in and around Naples, and in 1835 walked to Rome, keeping himself by painting and drawing portraits.

He found Rome in an uncongenial political uproar, so went on to Florence, where he remained four years, copying in the Uffizi for a living and producing for dealers what were virtually forgeries. In 1839 he was in Milan and Venice, studying Titian, and in 1840 was in Rome, where he met Thorvaldsen and worked in his studio until he returned to England in 1842.

He failed even to get a mention in the 1842 Houses of Parliament competition, worked for industrialists on products exhibited in the 1851 Great Exhibition, and in 1856 had his first success with the Wellington monument in St Paul's CathedralGLOSSARYThe principal church of a province or diocese, where the throne of the bishop is placed. For reasons lost to time and tradition, a cathedral always faces west - toward the setting sun. The altar is placed at the east end. The main body, or nave, of the cathedral is usually divided into one main and two side aisles. These lead up to the north and south transepts, or arms of the cross, the shape in which a cathedral is usually formed., although the equestrian statue of the Duke was not erected until forty-five years after the artist's death. He did decorative works in houses now destroyed and on mosaics in St Paul's Cathedral (finished 1864). He painted occasional portraits, but his principal surviving works are drawings, chiefly in sanguineGLOSSARYRed chalk with a rownish tinge, used for drawing., the main inspiration for which was Raphael. There are large collections of his work in Liverpool and London (Tate GalleryGLOSSARYan upper story, similar to a tribune, running along the side of a building and open on one side to the interior; in a church (basilica) above the side aisles, over the ambulatory (central-plan building) and also over the west end. The gallery was used to keep certain groups of worshippers apart (women, noblemen).) with most of his surviving paintings and sculpture, and Cambridge (Fitzwilliam Museum), Oxford and Sheffield have many drawings.