Wheelwright's home (La maison du charron)

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>Wheelwright's home (La Maison du Charron</em>) is a drypoint/etching that depicts the thatched residence of a wheelwright. Surrounding the house are trees and farmland. In front of the house is an empty cart which rests on its wheels in a furrow, indicating the occupation of the owner of the house. The front of the house shaded with a heavy black line, perhaps suggesting the smoke and soot of the wheelwright’s work when it involved attaching metal bands to the wheels to give them added strength. This is in contrast to the light line and open white space of the surrounding farmland.

Legros was raised in the French countryside, in the small village of Véronnes-les-Petites. Born into a poor family and sent out to work from a young age, he was aware of the countryside’s hardships but also its beauty. As Timothy Wilcox has noted "[t]he roots of Legros's profound attachment to rural life are to be traced among the variegated landscape of low hills, enlivened by little rivers and patches of woodland [of Véronnes-les-Petites]" <em>(Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</em>). Significantly, he continued to depict scenes from French rural life well after his migration to England. <em>Wheelwright's house</em> itself dates to approximately thirty years after his initial migration to England and is therefore an evocative recollection of the French countryside which both illustrates its beauty and hints at the toil that goes on within it.

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/34480

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art   November 2018