Alfred Stevens, 'The Present', about 1866-71

Alfred Stevens was best known for his evocative paintings of elegant – and often faintly enigmatic – women in gorgeous clothes posed against a glamorous background. They presented an ideal vision of the upper classes of mid- to late nineteenth-century Paris and were perhaps a diversion from the turbulent times in which they lived.

The pictures often featured a mirror into which the woman might be shown glancing at her own appearance, but she is sometimes focused on someone or something unseen in the room behind her. There is something of the ‘art for art’s sake’ about these images – in the women and their surroundings. It was enough for both to be beautiful, rich and sophisticated rather than having some inner meaning – this was typical of works of art of the Aesthetic Movement fashionable at the time. And yet in Stevens’s work, perhaps more clearly stated in this picture than in others, there is also something darker. Stevens painted stories, but we are left to make our own interpretations – in the plural, for they can change each time you look at each picture.

In The Present, a young woman sits side-on to us. She wears the relaxed but delicate and costly gown characteristic of the Aesthetic Movement, her hair casually caught back in a soft chignon. She looks down, apparently calmly, at a gleaming ceramic statuette of a snarling tiger, poised to pounce, its expression and stylised pose reminiscent of mythological creatures in Japanese art. Unusually, there is no decorative background, just a plain black wall. The tablecloth is finely embroidered but in a subtle, unobtrusive colour.

The woman is slumped, caught unawares, unlike the majority of Stevens’s self-consciously poised sophisticates. Her head is erect but her lips are firmly pressed together and her eyes are downcast, held by the tiger that glares back at her. Stevens has paid great attention to the detail of its shell-like surface, its arched tail and bulging eyes. It glints in the light – but not enough to detract from the boldly lit note in the woman’s hand, about to slide to the floor between limp fingers. What kind of present is this? Stevens asks the question, but leaves the many possible answers to us.

Perhaps his cultured audience, aware of the fashion for all things Japanese in art and decoration, would have known that in Japanese mythology the tiger isn’t the dangerous, threatening beast often portrayed in European art, but a symbol of courage, strength and sometimes good luck. Stevens himself may not have known, though as a friend of other artists influenced by Japanese art, like Whistler and Manet, it’s unlikely. The subject of the picture clearly interested him enough to paint it at least five times, including one version that was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1866.