It incorporates a harmonious juxtaposition of superficial Dutch realism with the spreading Symbolist manner, as opposed to the bottom-up, pluralistic symbolism of the declining Romanticism.

Stevens belonged to the generation of Joseph Lies, Jean Pierre François Lamorinière and Liévin De Winne.

Alfred Stevens and his brothers grew up with their grandfather, who ran the popular Brussels cafe de l'amitié.

[3] After initially focusing on realistic, socially motivated works (1844), around 1855 he increasingly turned to the depiction of chic middle-class ladies.

He depicted them all with their intricate hairstyles, colorful clothes and finery in genre pieces in which he captured a fleeting mood—he sadness of a farewell, the emotion of a letter, the rustle of a silk dress.

[4][1] The Second Empire was a very bourgeois and prosperous period in which Stevens became the chronicler par excellence of the demi-mondaines, making his name in Paris as a painter of beautifully dressed ladies.

They read books, waited for their lovers to return, made themselves up and passed their time in salons, exhibitions and seaside towns.

Stevens' characters often have strong facial features with a wide chin and short, sturdy arms and hands.

[3] In 1884 a friend of Steven's, the transgressive Baudelaire (who dedicated a poem to Stevens' brother Joseph and initially praised Alfred, although later, in an unpublished work, he condescendingly described him as a 'Flemish painter' because of the Flemings' excellence in the imitation of nature)[6] opposed the neoclassicism paradigm and defended his transgressive decadentism, stating: "Littérature de décadence!

His group of friends included Eugène Delacroix (who attended his wedding in 1858), Alexandre Dumas Jr., Édouard Manet, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Émile Zola.

"[12][13] Beside being renowned for its realism, The Parisian Sphinx has been described as enigmatic, with most critics pointing to the femme-fatale figure, and the hidden dangers beyond feminine tenderness.

By calling her a 'sphinx,' Stevens reinforced the hint of mystery that surrounds the apparent realism of an ordinary Parisian bourgeois lady's depiction.

Stevens usually portrayed contemporary women purely as seductive subjects, although they had been traditionally given historical or mythological roles in painting.

By contrast, according to Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtis, in this painting Stevens encoded his supposedly realistic portrait with the danger of the mythological figure.

Since the mid-19th century, Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist artists had been employing literary metaphors wherein femininity covertly represented love and death.

Some features of the painting are reminiscent of Rossetti's Bocca Baciata, where the mouth functions as "the classic fetish object that by recalling breast-feeding and sexuality, suggests the possibilities of pleasure, fear and loss."

The fur scarf barely discernible from her hair and contrasting with the softness of her muslin dress, reminds of the animality of the Sphinx.