Miss Stevens is one of the women sculptors who have been selected to share in the decoration of the buildings for the St. Louis Exposition.  She is to make two reclining figures on the pediment over the main entrance to the Liberal Arts Building.  She has in her studio two reclining figures which will probably serve to fulfil this commission.

Miss Stevens is modest about her work and does not care to talk much about this important commission, even suggesting that her design may not be accepted; if she is successful it will certainly be an unusual honor for a woman at her age, whose artistic career covers less than five years.

STEVENS, MARY. Bronze medal at the Crystal Palace.  Member of the Dudley Gallery, London.  Born at Liverpool.  Pupil of William Kerry and of her husband, Albert Stevens, in England, and of the Julian Academy, Paris.

Mrs. Stevens’ pictures were well considered when she exhibited a variety of subjects; of late, however, she has made a specialty of pictures of gardens, and has painted in many famous English and French gardens, among others, those of Holland House, Warwick Castle, and St. Anne’s, Dublin.  In France, the gardens of the Duchesse de Dino and the Countess Foucher de Careil.

Mrs. Stevens—­several of whose works are owned in America—­has commissions to paint in some American gardens and intends to execute them in 1904.

STILLMAN, MARIE SPARTALI. Pupil of Ford Madox Brown.  This artist first exhibited in public at the Dudley Gallery, London, in 1867, a picture called “Lady Pray’s Desire.”  In 1870 she exhibited at the Royal Academy, “Saint Barbara” and “The Mystic Tryst.”  In 1873 she exhibited “The Finding of Sir Lancelot Disguised as a Fool” and “Sir Tristram and La Belle Isolde,” both in water-colors.  Of these, a writer in the Art Journal said:  “Mrs. Stillman has brought imagination to her work.  These vistas of garden landscape are conceived in the true spirit of romantic luxuriance, when the beauty of each separate flower was a delight.  The figures, too, have a grace that belongs properly to art, and which has been well fitted to pictorial expression.  The least satisfactory part of these clever drawings is their color.  There is an evident feeling of harmony, but the effect is confused and the prevailing tones are uncomfortably warm.”

W. M. Rossetti wrote:  “Miss Spartali has a fine power of fusing the emotion of her subject into its color and of giving aspiration to both; beyond what is actually achieved one sees a reaching toward something ulterior.  As one pauses before her work, a film in that or in the mind lifts or seems meant to lift, and a subtler essence from within the picture quickens the sense.  In short, Miss Spartali, having a keen perception of the poetry which resides in beauty and in the means of art for embodying beauty, succeeds in infusing that perception into the spectator of her handiwork.”