Angler (Le pêcheur à la ligne)

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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Angler (Le pêcheur à la ligne) is an etching that depicts a single fisherman seated on a river bank surrounded by trees. Legros has skilfully used the etching needle to create a ‘burr’ of metal on the plate, producing a rich, velvety line which gives texture to the branches and bark of trees. The line creating the trees and grass of the riverside landscape is soft and free. This conveys the wild, unpredictable character of nature. In contrast, the line used to illustrate the figure of the fisherman is hard and firm. Is he a poor rural labourer, or even poacher, who will go hungry if he doesn’t catch anything? Or is the firmness of line a reflection of the resolution of a middle-class angler, holidaying in the countryside, and throwing his catch back into the water?

Legros understood the subject matter perfectly, as he had a rural childhood, born in a poor family near the village of Véronnes-les-Petites in Burgundy, and he may have even sympathised with the poacher. His work is always a mix of reimagined childhood memories and realism, leaving room for the viewer to speculate on any narrative, as we have done here. And perhaps the true stars of the print are the trees, not the fisherman of the title.

Sources:

https://doi.org/10.1093/benz/9780199773787.article.B00106871 (Benezit Dictionary of Artists)

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

Grove Art Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T050109

Malcolm C. Salaman, Modern Masters of Etching: Alphonse Legros (The Studio: London, 1926)

Gary Tinterow and Henri Loyrette, Origins of Impressionism (Harry N. Abrams, Inc: New York, 1994)

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