Portrait of the artist

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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A self-portrait drypoint print, with the subject depicted in profile, Portrait of the artist shows Legros in the last few years of his life as he neared the age of seventy. He has used a mass of fine drypoint lines to build illustrate the texture of his hair and beard, with detail of his face drawn in a contrastingly dark, shaded detail. Legros’s clothes are only lightly suggested; it is his face, particularly his eyes, that stand out. As an artist, Legros was particularly noted for his strong visual memory. He had been trained to draw from memory but, more than simply reproducing a scene accurately, he also possessed a talent imbuing his work with emotional feeling.

Legros took his work seriously, believing strongly that an artist should have their composition worked out before beginning, as his former student Charles Holroyd remembered; "[h]e once told me that a picture should be finished from the very beginning and you should be ready to die at any moment".

Yet Legros was a good deal more eccentric than this suggests; he sang operettas at parties and never learned to speak English despite living for many years in England. Little of his joy of living is, however, evoked in this grave and meditative self-portrait. Instead, it suggests that Legros has admired, almost certainly in reproduction, Leonardo da Vinci's celebrated Portrait of a man in red chalk (c. 1512; Biblioteca Real, Turin), which is widely though not universally regarded as a self-portrait.

Sources:

Lizzie Carey-Thomas (ed.), Migrations – Journeys into British Art (Tate Publishing: London, 2012)

Maurice Harold Grant, ‘A Dictionary of British Etchers’, (London: Rockliff, 1953), pp. 127–128

Timothy Wilcox, ‘Legros, Alphonse (1837–1911)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2004): https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34480

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Legros

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_a_Man_in_Red_Chalk

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art    July 2018