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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<em>La charrue (The plough)</em> is an 1874 etching that depicts a farmer who has paused in the act of ploughing to fix the plough, while his workhorses, viewed from the back, wait patiently. Into the distance stretch the furrows and flat earth he has yet to plough. Legros has used a stark, sketchy line and lots of empty white space to convey the vastness of the rural landscape and the hard physical labour that takes place in it.
La charrue has echoes of Gustave Courbet’s (1819-1877) depictions of the rural working poor, and had Vincent van Gogh seen Legros' etching, he would have loved it. Courbet - like Legros and Van Gogh in turn - believed that artists should portray the world around them, especially the lives of ordinary people. Legros identified with the life of rural labourers, as he had been born into a poor rural family, and apprenticed to a house painter at the age of eleven where "he suffered both hunger and cold". (Salaman, p. 3).
La charrue is no vision of a rural idyll; the farmer has stopped his work in order to fix the plough and if he cannot resume ploughing than the consequences could be dire. The vast spaces poignantly reflect the work he has left to do. Yet La charrue is likely not based on a scene that Legros had witnessed in 1874; he had lived at that time for over ten years in London. Instead, the pint depicts a reality recalled from Legros' intense experience - and remarkable visual memory.
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)
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/34480Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art July 2018