Georges Stein

Georges Stein, the name under which Séverin Louis Stein painted, was born in Paris on 12 February 1864, the son of a bookbinder of Luxembourg origin. He trained under Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger and from the 1890s devoted himself to the city of his birth: the grands boulevards, the Opéra, the Champs-Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne, seen at the hour when the lamps come on and cabs, omnibuses and elegant women fill the street.

He worked in oil, watercolour, gouache and pastel, showed eight paintings at the Salon des Indépendants of 1906 and exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français from 1912 to 1914. In 1910 he painted four large canvases for the casino of Vichy, and he also depicted London, Vichy, Melun and the Swiss cities of Bern, Lausanne and Geneva.

Stein belongs with Jean Béraud, Luigi Loir and Eugène Galien-Laloue among the painters who fixed the image of Belle Époque Paris, and his night scenes, with their gas lamps and wet reflections, are the most sought-after part of his work. He also illustrated books, among them Léo Claretie’s Les Grands boulevards of 1897.

Dealers’ catalogues often give his dates as 1870–1955. The Paris birth register and a Geneva death notice, cited by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, establish that he was born in 1864 and died in Geneva in December 1917.