Description

Alphonse Legros (Dijon, 1837 – Watford, 1911)

Alphonse Legros : The lectern

Original etching

Proof on laid paper with watermark ‘Aqua Fortistes’. Date of edition : 1865. Printing house Delâtre rue St Jacques, 303, Paris. Published by Cadart & Luquet, publishers, 79 rue Richelieu. Presence of the dry stamp of Cadart.

Dimensions of the leaf : H. 360 mm x W. 552 mm – dimensions at the coppermark : H. 270 mm x W. 372 mm

Condition : traces of mounting on the back and on the front in the upper margin, light scattered foxing in the margins.

Alphonse Legros is a French painter, engraver and sculptor naturalized British. He became famous as a teacher at the University College London and marked the art of drawing in the United Kingdom at the end of the Victorian era.

As a teenager, he attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon and was apprenticed to Master Nicolardo, a picture painter, to learn the painting trade before moving to Paris in 1851, where he held small jobs with art craftsmen. He entered the Petite Ecole where he met Jules Dalou, Auguste Rodin and Henri Fantin-Latour. He attended evening classes at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and became friends with the American painter Whistler. Encouraged by Whistler, he moved to London in 1863 and married Frances Rosetta Hodgson in 1864. Invited by Degas, he participated in the second Impressionist Salon in 1876 without really sharing their pictorial approaches and became increasingly interested in copperplate engraving. After various subsistence artistic activities, he first obtained a position as a professor of engraving at the South Kensington School of Art before being called to University College in London where, for more than 16 years, from 1876 to 1892, he taught the art of engraving. He obtained British nationality in 1881 and continued to create regularly, especially in the field of engraving (etchings and medallions), without abandoning his links with France.

Alphonse Legros' pictorial work is well represented in French museums (Musée d'Orsay, Musée Rodin), as are his copper engravings and lithographs; the latter are also very numerous in the United Kingdom (Tate Gallery, National Portrait Gallery).