Palm Sunday,  or  The Boughs (Les Rameaux), or Eternal Love (Les amours éternelles), by Alfred Stevens

Born in Brussels, Alfred Stevens spent most of his career in Paris, and in the 1860s became renowned for his paintings of elegantly dressed Parisian women in domestic settings. Stevens created four versions of Palm Sunday. The painting in HoMA’s permanent collection is the most complex among the group, while three other versions in collections outside of Hawai‘i are virtually identical. While Stevens, a popular and successful artist, sometimes created replicas to sell to collectors, according to art historian William A. Coles the artist frequently altered additional versions and it is unusual for three nearly identical copies to exist.

HoMA’s painting has been referred to as the “Robert Hoe version,” as it was originally owned by Robert Hoe III of New York (1839–1909), a business owner, printing press equipment manufacturer, and collector of rare books and art objects. Robert gave the painting to his daughter Ruth, and she passed it on to her son Edward Sterling, who married longtime museum supporter Betty Sterling. Betty’s daughter Susan Palmore then gifted the work to HoMA as part of her mother’s estate.

The version in the Walters Art Museum collection in Baltimore is less detailed and features a fair-haired model, versus the brunette at the center of the HoMA painting. Another replica, Im Boudoir, is in the collection of the Sammlung Schack in Munich, Germany, while the third painting was noted in 1977 to be in the Gabriel Astruc Collection. HoMA’s work incorporates brighter color and added details including a white cat, a framed image of the Virgin Mary, a floral curtain, pink bedding, and the tender, expressive gesture of the young woman’s hand, all of which add to the luxurious sensuality of the picture.

Stevens’s paintings of intimate domestic scenes such as Palm Sunday envelop the viewer in a shared experience of longing, remembrance, and devotion, while the history of this piece demonstrates the far-reaching impact of familial and societal connections through generations.

—Katherine Love, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

Alfred Stevens (Belgian, 1823–1906)
Palm Sunday or Les Rameaux or Les Amours Eternelles, c. 1862
Oil on canvas
Gift of Susan Palmore for the Estate of Betty Sterling, 2007 (13721.1)