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Overview
Alphonse Legros (1837–1911) was an Anglo-French etcher, lithographer, painter and medallist. An accomplished creator of macabre allegories and realist scenes of the French countryside, he made a massive impact on the British Etching Revival.
Born in Dijon, a move to Paris by his family in 1851 saw the fourteen-year-old Legros working as a scene-painter of opera sets. During this time Legros also received further training at the École Impériale de Dessin, Paris, under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran (1802–1897), whose method of teaching required students to copy Louvre works through mental recollection alone – emphasising the importance of a strong visual memory. Although Legros would spend much of his life living in Britain, his subject matter stayed distinctly French. His landscapes were enriched by memories of time spent during his childhood.
Legros moved to London in 1863, taught as Master of etching at the South Kensington School of Art in 1875 and was made Slade Professor at University College London in 1876. Upon his retirement in 1893, Legros appeared jaded about his time spent teaching, allegedly saying ‘vingt ans perdus’ – ‘twenty years lost’. Despite this disillusionment, during this time Legros shaped the future of the British Etching Revival through his notable students, such as William Strang and Charles Holroyd. Students and critics both noted his insistence on the quality of line which laid the foundation for the ‘Slade tradition’ of fine draughtsmanship.
Legros’ works exhibit less economy of line than the younger generation of etching revivalists; as a result, his scenes of allegory and peasant life in the French landscape are characterised by bold outlines and heavy crosshatching. He was a terrific technician, evident in his use of etching and drypoint alike.
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Farm at the monastery is a drypoint and etching print that depicts a monastery or abbey in the French countryside, with a lone figure in the foreground as a rain storm is coming on. Specifically, we are shown the farm at the back of the monastery, the area of physical labour away from religious ceremony and sacrament. The monastery is a dark shape in the distance, rising out of the rocky landscape. Legros has used a heavy, dark line to depict the old building, befitting the solemnity of the contemplation that takes place there. All that is in the background, however. Instead, the print focusses on the farm which provides the monastery with its sustenance. The farm is depicted through loose line and lots of white space, giving it a sense of natural informality in contrast to the monastery. In the foreground, a farmworker in straw hat tends to the farm, moving a tray of produce or seedlings inside a shed before the rain begins in earnest.
Legros would have been familiar with the physical labour that makes monastic life possible. At the age of fourteen, he had been employed to work on frescoes for the Chapel of Cardinal de Bonald in Lyon Cathedral and so would have had the opportunity to observe the secular activity that goes on in religious spaces. Legros grew up in a poor rural family and he may have also been familiar with role of the monastery as a place which would use "any abundance of produce or skill to provide care to the poor and needy, refuge to the persecuted or education to the young".
Sources:
Maurice Harold Grant, ‘A Dictionary of British Etchers’, (London: Rockliff, 1953), pp. 127–128
Grove Art Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T050109
Malcolm C. Salaman, Modern Masters of Alphonse Legros (The Studio: London, 1926)
Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbey
Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Legros
Timothy Wilcox, ‘Legros, Alphonse (1837–1911)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2004): https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34480
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art July 2018