Les chantres Espagnols - Le Lutre (The Spanish cantors, or The lectern)

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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Les chantres Espagnols - Le Lutre (The Spanish cantors or The lecturn) is one of Legros' most celebrated prints. An early work, it depicts a group of Spanish cantors – leaders of prayer – sitting together in a monastery. They appear to be rehearsing as two monks are standing at the lectern reading from a large book – possibly the copy of the Gospels - while the others are sitting in pews holding candlesticks. The scene is dark, with the monks in their black robes shrouded in the shadows of the stone room. Legros has used a very heavy line with very few white spaces left blank on the paper. Only the candle flames, the Gospel and some of the monks' faces have been etched with a light line and some white space. The darkness of the space conveys the seriousness of the cantors' duty as leaders in prayer. Indeed, it has been said that "God dwells within each human person in the place where music takes its source" (Guidelines for Cantors in the Diocese of Manchester, p. 4).

Although Legros was apparently not a conventionally religious man, he was considered by Maurice Dreyfous to be "the painter of a man or woman transformed by the emotion imparted by faith" (Dreyfous, quoted in Collet, p. 120). By the later 1860s he had become noted for his religious scenes, having depicted a scene similar to Les chantres Espagnols... in The Lectern (1863-1865).

Sources:

Isabelle Collet, ‘Ex-Voto’, in Anna Gruetzner Robins, ‘Alphonse Legros: Migrant and Cultural Ambassador’, Impressionists in London: French Artist in Exile 1870-1904 (Tate Publishing: London, 2017) edited by Caroline Corbeau-Parsons