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Alphonse Legros (1837-1911)

Morning mist on the river

 

Pastel

Signed et dated 1905 lower left

 

24 x 41 cm

 

Born in Dijon in 1837, Alphonse Legros attended the École des Beaux-Arts in his hometown before moving to Paris, where he worked for the theatre and opera decorator Charles Antoine Cambon. He then entered La Petite École, run by Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, where he met Jules Dalou, Auguste Rodin and Henri Fantin- Latour. Fantin-Latour represented him alongside Whistler, Baudelaire and Manet in his painting Hommage à Delacroix. It was while attending evening classes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris that he became friends with the painter James McNeill Whistler.

 

Encouraged by Whistler, Alphonse Legros moved to London in 1863. There he met the artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Georges Frederick Watts and Sir Edward Poynter, who recommended him for the post of professor of engraving at the Slade, where he was appointed in 1876. A founding member of the Society of Painters- Etchers in 1880, whose influence on the revival of engraving and the art of the illustrated book was notable, Legros was also a renowned medallist and sculptor. When he died in 1911, he was a British citizen to whom the Tate Gallery paid tribute with a major retrospective exhibition.

 

This versatile artist also enjoyed success in France, where an exhibition was organised by Samuel Bing in his Parisian gallery L’Art nouveau in 1898, before the retrospective at the Musée du Luxembourg in 1900. The last exhibition devoted to Alphonse Legros was held in Dijon in 1987.

 

An exceptional draughtsman (Auguste Rodin wrote of his years at La Petite École: ‘My drawings were absolutely impersonal; those of Legros, on the contrary, were already those of a master’), Alphonse Legros was collected by Degas and Baudelaire alike.

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