Stevens built his reputation on refined, closely observed paintings of well-dressed Parisian women in domestic interiors, work that made him one of the most sought-after portrayers of fashionable Second Empire life^[1]. What is Called Vagrancy stands apart from that body of work in subject, taking as its title a term from law and social policy rather than a description of appearance or setting. Belgian by birth, Stevens worked for most of his career in Paris, where he was also known for collecting Japanese and East Asian decorative objects, a taste he shared with a circle that included the younger Belgian painter James Ensor^[1].

From the middle of the nineteenth century, poverty and destitution became a recognised subject for French painters, treated by Realists such as Gustave Courbet and Honoré Daumier and by a group of state-acknowledged genre painters, including Isidore Pils, François Bonvin and Théodule Ribot, whose images of the poor received Salon recognition and were read, in part, as evidence of official concern for social welfare^[1]. A painting titled around the legal term for vagrancy, rather than around a scene or a sitter, places itself within this tradition of socially pointed genre painting rather than within Stevens's more familiar fashionable interiors.

Vagrancy was not a neutral description in nineteenth-century France but a specific legal category. Begging and wandering without settled means, once tolerated in earlier centuries as a condition associated with pilgrims and the pious poor, had by this period become tied in law and in public opinion to laziness and criminality, and people classed as vagrants faced arrest and punishment under that framework^[2]. A title that frames its subject as 'what is called' vagrancy, rather than simply as vagrancy, points to the term itself as something imposed by law rather than a fact about the people it named.