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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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Breton peasant is a head and shoulders portrait of a male peasant from the province of Brittany in north-west France. He is a labourer, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat which covers his neck. That he has spent a lifetime in working in the sun can read in his lean, tanned face. He is bearded, although it is a short one unlike the impeccably styled long beards of 19th-century bourgeois men like Degas and Manet. His clothes, though lightly suggested, appear to be a workman’s overcoat and a sunhat. It is clear that this man is a member of France’s rural working poor whose lives were chronicled by many artists including Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) whom Legros admired. Yet the man is smiling; he seems lost in happy thoughts.
Usually, depictions of the peasantry in the 19th century tended to swing toward one of two extremes; either the artist would focus on the tragic back-breaking physical labour that made up the majority of the peasant’s life (e.g. J.F. Millet) or they would sentimentally whitewash their depiction of rural life so that only the most picturesque aspects remain (e.g. Jules Breton). Legros does neither. Both approaches leave little room for the lives of peasantry to be considered in their complexity. While Legros could sometimes tend toward the gothic in his depictions of the poor, in this print he combines a realistic depiction of the weathered face of an old labourer with a very human sense of personality. The sitter may be a peasant, but he is entitled to his private thoughts and feelings.
Legros was born into a poor rural family and was raised among his cousins in the small village of Véronnes-les-Petites, Burgundy. During his childhood "he suffered both hunger and cold" while apprenticed to a house painter at the age of eleven (Salaman, p. 3). Yet, he also loved the beauty of the French countryside, so deeply that the "the variegated landscape of low hills, enlivened by little rivers and patches of woodland" of Véronnes-les-Petites remained a favourite subject of his after years of living in London (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).
In Breton peasant therefore, Legros has depicted his subject with both accuracy and uncommon empathy.
Sources:
Maurice Harold Grant, ‘A Dictionary of British Etchers’, (London: Rockliff, 1953), pp. 127–128
Malcolm Salaman, Modern Masters of Alphonse Legros (The Studio: London, 1926)
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