“La Mort du Vagabond (Death of a Vagrant)” by Alphonse Legros

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La Mort du Vagabond

(Death of a Vagrant)

Alphonse Legros

c.1878;

Etching in brown ink with plate tone on paper

21 ⅞ x 15 ⅜ inches (55.5 x 39.0 cm) – sheet size.

Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, accession no. CAI.35.

This print exists in three states. The final state shows a dead vagrant lying on a bank beside a tree and propped up on a hedge. A storm is seen approaching at the upper right.

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Monkhouse was particularly impressed by this etching and its genesis: “But those of his etchings which are probably the best known, his ‘Wood-cutters,’, and ‘Death of the Vagabond,’, exhibit some salient features of his landscape art. In the latter, there is but a tree and a hedge, both bare of leaves and beauty: the tree, with its head cut off, crossing the picture diagonally, the hedge a mere scrub of twigs. Nothing in nature could have been selected with less regard to beauty; but the tree-trunk is a masterly study of growing wood, and neither it, nor the hedge could have been more pathetically or artistically appropriate to the dead stark figure of the poor vagabond, who lies stretched below them. Strange to say, the figure was invented for the tree, and not the tree for the figure, so that Legros, unprovoked by special sentiment, chose to select this unlovely growth as a subject worthy of his art. In the first or second state of the plate there was no tramp; there was only a tree being felled and pulled down like that in the ‘Wood-cutters’ (332). — Dennis T. Lanigan

Bibliography

Monkhouse, Cosmo. “Professor Legros.” The Magazine of Art V (1882): 327-34.

Last modified 25 November 2022