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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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Large Spaniard (Le grand Espagnol) is a head and shoulders portrait of an elderly Spanish man wearing the traditional Spanish cloak known as a Pañosa. He sits very upright. His gaze is piercing, the artist having gone into a lot of detail to capture the angular features of this man’s face. He is every inch the 'grand Espagnol' of the print’s title.
Legros was well-known as a portraitist. In fact, he was so adept at quickly painting ‘demonstration heads’ in under two hours that he embarked on two tours in 1879-1880 where he painted "before invited audiences of art students and local worthies in Sunderland, Manchester, Aberdeen, and Liverpool, where the products of these performances can still be found." (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) His skill at painting with speed and accuracy was honed during his professorship at the Slade School of Art, University College London from 1876-1893.
However, while his portraits may have quick and accurate they were not mere mechanical copies of the sitters’ features. Legros was also known for his talent of imbuing portraits with a sense of individual personality. The Large Spaniard is evidence of this, particularly when compared with the print Viel Espagnol (c. 1872) (1965-0012-197). Ostensibly, they depict the same subject – an old Spanish man wearing a Pañosa. Legros however, has managed to give each a completely different sense of personality. While the subject of Viel Espagnol appears pensive, drawn with a gentle and free line, the figure in this print looks imposing, giving the viewer a hard stare. Even his Pañosa is drawn with a sharper and more exacting line.
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
http://losaccesoriosmasculinos.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-spaniard-cloak-or-spanish-cloak.html
Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaniard_cloak
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art November 2018
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