Legros was a prolific printmaker throughtout his working life including of etchings, drypoints, and lithograpghs. His subjects included many of the same themes as his paintings as well as portraits of many of his fellow artists, both French and English, and other prominent men of his time. Malcolm Salaman, in discussing Legros as an etcher, remarked: “He published his first etchings in 1857…but the Paris public of those days seemingly had little sympathy with the high seriousness, the weirdness, the sombreness, and withal the deep humanity of Legros’s art, and nine years later he came to London. In the interval he had produced many remarkable and powerful plates, weird, grave, pathetic things most of them, and dramatically expressive, such as La Mort du Vagabond; Les Chantres Espagnols, wherein the spiritual significance is shown strangely in conflict with the physical…During his long career his output of prints was enormous – 700, I believe…Yet in no etching of Legros’s that I have seen is there any note of commonness, however humble the subject, any lack of distinction, any lowering of the artistic standard of pictorial expression and vitality that gives to all his best work the classic stamp. One feels always that here is an artist with something individual to say, and an authoritative ways of saying it. In every print the personal expression is strong and vivid” (38).
Campbell Dodson, a former Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum summed up Legros status and one of the most important etchers of his time: “He was certainly one of the very great painter-etchers of the nineteenth century, a man of cultivated and disciplined taste and high ideals, a reverent student of the great art of the past, and a creator of great art himself. He was great in landscape, in portraiture and in the invention of a peculiar type of figure compositions, severe as the monastic rule which binds the religieux whom they depict, archaic as the age-long tradition which binds with an equal, if less consciously realized, force the conservative French peasant who figures, equally with monk and priest, in the early etchings of Legros. Equally remarkable was his originality when he sought inspiration in works of literature, such as the weird tales of Edgar Allan Poe. In figure subjects his style could be by turns romantic and tender, as in Le Jouer De Viole, placid and dreamy as in Le Savant Endormi, startling as in Le Chat Noir, or violent and brutal as in Le Puits et Le Pendule. He had all the earnestness and sympathy with peasant life as Jean-François Millet, and far more variety. Like many of the best French etchings of the nineteenth century, those of Legros are the result of the artist’s fearless expression of his own thoughts and fancy, making no concession to the popular taste for the pretty and easily intelligible” (xiii-xiv).
Bibliography
Dodgson, Campbell: A catalogue of the etchings, drypoints and lithographs by Professor Alphonse Legros in the collection of Frank E. Bliss. London: Printed for Private Circulation, 1923, cat. no. 80.
Salaman, Malcolm C.: The Great Painter-Etchers from Rembrandt to Whistler. London: The Studio Ltd., 1914.
Created 21 November 2022