Triomphe de la Mort: La Mort balaie les Vices. (Triumph of Death; Death sweeps away sinners)

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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Legros’s etching and drypoint Triomphe de la Mort: La Mort balaie les Vices (The Triumph of Death; Death sweeps away Sinners) captures the scene as death descends on a family in a forest clearing by a wayside. The robed skeletal figure of Death, wielding a broom, is driving two adult figures, male and female, away into the distance. Another adult male figure lies by the trees, ignored by Death, perhaps he has predeceased the couple or – less likely – has survived the arrival of Death. The couple, clothed in rags, cling onto each other as they are driven away, without looking back. The man also clutches a bottle. Therefore the couple can be interpreted as two peasants whose weakness for the demon drink has led to their untimely deaths. Separated from the couple, lying at death’s feet is a helpless and now orphaned baby.

The date of the print is not certain. It is a rare print, with only 40 impressions made. Legros’s work had a strong macabre strain. This could be seen as early as 1861, when he etched a series of unpublished illustrations for Charles Baudelaire’s French translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Legros’s depictions of Death were probably inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1498) (Te Papa 1971-0028-2), and especially by Hans Holbein’s skeletal depictions of Death in prints such as The Mendicant Friar. However, Legros was also strongly influenced, as Peyton Skipwith reminds us, by the lore of his rural upbringing; "the transformation of the reaper into Grim Reaper was as natural a part of Legros’s artistic repertoire as it was of the mythology and folklore of rural Burgundy" (Skipwith in Helsinger, p. 69). In this print, Legros has blended the 19^th century realism of feckless peasants camping by a wayside with the supernatural personification of Death to create a macabre moral tale.

Sources:

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

Peyton Skipwith, ‘Toward a Gothic Vision’ in The ‘Writing’ of Modern Life: The Etching Revival in France, Britain and The U.S., 1850-1940 edited by Elizabeth Helsinger (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2008)

Timothy Wilcox, ‘Legros, Alphonse (1837–1911)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2004): https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34480

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Legros

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art   September 2018