Torso of a Young Woman, c. 1882. Bronze bust, height 121/4 inches (31 cm), width 173/8 inches (44 cm), and depth 121/4 inches (31 cm). Collection of the Manchester Art Gallery, accession no. 1933.69. Click on image to enlarge it.
This sculpture was made in bronze, marble, and plaster versions. It features a nude female torso with her hips tilted, and her right leg slightly forward. The torso of this work is truncated at the neck, at the upper arms, and above the right knee and slightly below the left knee. Bronze versions were cast in one piece, with a square base. The absence of the head and limbs may have been inspired by remnants of antique Greek sculpture or the work of his friend Auguste Rodin.
Such works also influenced the New Sculpture movement with similar examples by Francis Derwent Wood, Edward Onslow Ford, Edward Godwin, and Edgar Allan Howes. Marion Spielmann in his book on British sculpture singled out this work by Legros: “In the exquisite ‘Torso of a Woman’ the artist is seen at his best; complete in its beauty it is, however, not the beauty of a complete thing, being, after all, a fragment” (167).
Bronze versions are at the Museums Sheffield, National Gallery of Scotland, University College London Art Museum, Manchester Art Gallery, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A marble version is at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.
Bibliography
Spielmann, Marion H. British Sculpture and Sculptors of Today. London: Cassell and Co. Ltd, 1901.
Last modified 13 November 2022