This painting, also known as Confidence, is one of several by Stevens to treat the theme of consolation. As in his other works from the 1870s, here the anecdotal content of a letter containing distressing
news asserts itself in a glimpse of the life of fashionable Parisian women in their elegant interiors. Stevens's subject matter and his meticulous attention to contemporary dress and decor elicited analogies to
seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art; in fact, one critic called him the Gerard ter Borch of France.
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