Peter Stevens

Art Brokerage: Peter Stevens British Artist: b. 1920-2001. Peter Sterne Stevens was born March 27, 1920 in Cardiff, England. His mother was Myvanwy Stevens, a Welsh artist, who had returned home to Wales to be with her family during the birth. His father was Lawrence Sterne Stevens, an ex-patriot American WWI veteran, who had studied art in Europe and had remained there to work as an illustrator. Peter Stevens was educated in Belgium and Geneva, while his father worked as a designer for the General Motors Company in Brussels and Antwerp. In 1932 at age twelve he routinely traveled by cablecar up to his school overlooking Lake Geneva. In 1937 at age seventeen he visited America by himself. He traveled around the country and fell in love with his father's ancestral homeland. In 1939 he studied under Sir Walter Russell at the Royal Academy of Art in London, where he met another young art student, Diana, whose family lived in Nairobi, British East Africa. His first professional art assignments were commissioned portraits. In 1943 he sold freelance pulp covers to Popular Publication's magazine Argosy. It is remarkable that at that same time, his father also began to sell interior story illustration to the same magazine under the pseudonym, "Lawrence." In 1952 he joined the American Artist agency began to work for slick magazines, such as The American Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Family Circle, Liberty, McCall's, Redbook, and The Saturday Evening Post. By 1961 the trend in magazine design was turning away from classic illustration, just as his portrait commissions were growing more successful. He was represented by Portraits Incorporated of New York City with a steady stream of significant clients. Peter Stevens died from cancer at age eighty-one on December 4, 2001. Listings wanted.