It appears that not much is known about the Dorset born artist Alfred Stevens, but he has been described as The English Michaelangelo and one of the greatest of all English craftsmen and designers. He designed the Wellington memorial in St Pauls Cathedral, the lions at the British Museum and one of the heaviest, largest books in our Local Studies Library is devoted to him.
Alfred Stevens was born in 1817 in Blandford. The family lived in a house behind number 38 Salisbury Street and there is still a blue plaque commemorating this. His father George was a house painter and sign writer in and around Blandford, but he was also a talented artist in heraldic art and would work for the local gentry such as the Drax family of Charborough Park.
Although Alfred may have inherited his talents from his father it is said that George often had drunken rages and as a result Alfred would take every opportunity to escape. Frank King, gunmaker and a childhood friend of Alfred’s, remembers the Reform Bill riots in 1831.
I well recollect the second night of Rioting in Blandford in White-Cliff, Mill Street when Alfred Stevens, Harvey Applin and myself pulled up the flint stones in that street for the rioters to smash the back premises of George Moore, Solicitor for the Tory Member.
It wasn’t long before Alfred’s talents as an artist were spotted by the Reverend Samuel Best, Rector of Blandford St Mary and in 1833, at the age of sixteen, he was given £60 (£4000 in today’s money) and was shipped off to Italy to study
The journey itself, to London by coach and thence to Naples by sea in a small cargo-boat, took some two to three months in all, and was obviously a tremendous experience in itself to a country lad who, until he sailed from London, had seen no town larger than Blandford.
– Towndrow, 1939
Years later Stevens recollects that he could have gone to study with Landseer in London but that it was too expensive.
Walking hundreds of miles between Naples, Rome and Florence he would study under the great masters earning his keep by drawing and painting portraits on his way. It must have been intriguing for the locals to see this young English lad who spoke little or no Italian walking around with money in his pocket sketching his way around Italy. It is also said that he was involved in political intrigues and spent some time in jail. He eventually became an assistant of the Neo-Classical sculptor Bertel Thorwaldson and returned to England in 1842.
On his return from Italy Stevens considered himself equipped as an artist in the true Renaissance sense: as painter, sculptor, architect, and decorative designer.
