ALPHONSE LEGROS

Artist Info

ALPHONSE LEGROS1837-1911

Legros, Alphonse

(b Dijon, 8 May 1837; d Watford, 8 Dec 1911).

British etcher, painter, sculptor and teacher of French birth. He is said to have been apprenticed at the age of 11 to a sign-painter, at which time he may also have attended classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Dijon. In 1855 he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, attending irregularly until 1857. During this period Legros had a taste for early Netherlandish art and for French Romanticism, which was later superseded by his admiration for Claude, Poussin and Michelangelo. However, his devotion to Holbein proved constant and was apparent as early as his first Salon painting, Portrait of the Artist's Father (1857; Tours, Mus. B.-A.)

Legros began etching in 1855; he preferred this medium and produced over 600 plates.

In 1859 Legros, Whistler and Henri Fantin-Latour, a fellow student at Lecoq's, dubbed themselves the Société des Trois: a union founded more on personal solidarity than on any artistic programme. With Ex-voto (Dijon, Mus. B.-A.), awarded an honourable mention at the Salon of 1860, Legros emerged as a leader of the younger generation of realists, notwithstanding his conspicuous dependence on Courbet. However, this critical success brought no financial security, and in 1863, with Whistler's encouragement, Legros visited London where he found admirers and patrons, notably the Ionides family, and was ardently promoted by the brothers Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti. Despite winning medals in the Salons of 1867 and 1868 and receiving the support of the critics Louis-Edmond Duranty and Philippe Burty in Paris, Legros resolved to remain in London. He was naturalized in 1880.

In 1876 Edward John Poynter recommended Legros to succeed him as Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School (see England, §XV ). Legros occupied this position until 1893 and introduced etching and modelling to the syllabus.

With its classically inspired economy of form and design, Legros's interpretation of his realist subject-matter exerted a decisive influence in England on the representation of peasant life in the 1880s, comparable with that of Jules Bastien-Lepage. He had a taste for the macabre, which endured from his illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe of 1861 to be absorbed into the Symbolism of the 1890s (as in the series Triumph of Death, begun 1894).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Bénédite: 'Alphonse Legros', The Studio, xxix (1903), pp. 3-22

G. Soulier: L'Oeuvre gravé et lithographié de Alphonse Legros (Paris, 1904)

A catalogue of Paintings, Drawings, Etchings and Lithographs by Professor Alphonse Legros (1837-1911) from the Collection of Frank E. Bliss (exh. cat., London, Grosvenor Gal., 1922)

A Catalogue of the Etchings, Drypoints and Lithographs by Professor Alphonse Legros (1837-1911) in the Collection of Frank E. Bliss (London, 1923)

M. C. Salaman: Alphonse Legros, Modern Masters of Etching, ix (London, 1926)

G. P. Weisberg: 'Alphonse Legros and the Theme of Death and the Woodcutter', Bull. Cleveland Mus. A., lxi (1974), pp. 128-35

A. Seltzer: Alphonse Legros: The Development of an Archaic Visual Vocabulary in Nineteenth Century Art (diss., Binghamton, SUNY, 1980)

T. J. Wilcox: Alphonse Legros (1837-1911): Aspects of his Life and Work (diss., U. London, 1981)

P. Attwood: 'The Medals of Alphonse Legros', Medal, ii (1983), pp. 7-23 [with list of sculptures]

Alphonse Legros, 1837-1911 (exh. cat. by T. Wilcox, Dijon, Mus. B.-A., 1987)

TIMOTHY WILCOX