Au Bord de l'Eau, Effet du Matin (The Water’s Edge – Morning)). Etching in black ink with plate tone on off-white paper; 13 ⅝x 16 inches (34.5 x 40.5 cm) – sheet size. Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, accession no. CAI.827. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Legros devoted much of his passion for etching into landscape subjects, particularly later in his career. Even in many of his etchings that are not pure landscapes and may contain figures the landscape is often the predominant feature of the work. His landscape etchings tend to be particularly attractive when featuring strong contrasts of chiaroscuro like Au Bord de l'Eau, Effet du Matin [The Water’s Edge – Morning] or Lisière du Bois [Edge of the Forest]. He often uses plate tone effectively to supplement the effects of etching and drypoint in order to better interpret nature’s moods.
Left: Le Coup de Vent (A Gust of Wind) . Etching in black ink with plate tone on ivory paper; 21 x 17¾ inches (53.2 x 44.9 cm) – plate mark. Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, accession no. 1943.3.5392.. Right: La Mort du Vagabond (Death of a Vagrant). 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.
Cosmo Monkhouse considered Legros’s landscape etchings as “usually weird and melancholy” (331). He discussed this aspect of Legros landscape etchings extensively in his article in The Magazine of Art: “The austerity of his views both of life and art affects not only his pictures of humanity, but of inanimate nature. In one or two of his etchings he indeed shows some delight in the elegance as well as the strength of trees. In the Sheep Recovered he gives us receding rows of poplars not only graceful in composition but in themselves; in others, like the Catching Crayfish, he indulges in a quite Titianesque grandeur of trunk and mass of foliage. But he oftener contents himself with bare stems more remarkable for their strength than their beauty, and these he frequently cuts off a few feet above the ground, leaving nothing but stumps decorated with a few most melancholy twigs. Nevertheless, he has put forth all his force in some of these landscapes, with or without figures, and even more than his accustomed imagination. Some of them, as the Women Bathing, and the Gust of Wind,, are of astounding strength of design and light and shade; and, as yet unseen except by visitors to his studio, are a majestic series of large landscapes in sepia, which are equally remarkable for poetry of conception and grander of composition.
No etching of pure landscape by Legros has, I believe, become sufficiently well known to make a detailed reference to it useful here. The fine display of his work in this kind attracted much attention (among artists at least) at last year‘s exhibition of the Society of Painter-Etchers. Here were to be seen, beside his magnificent portrait of Watts and the latest and most striking version of Death and the Woodman,, his On the Canal, By the River-side, and Rocky Landscape – all rare examples of poetical conception, and executive skill” (331).
Sidney Colvin has also discussed the art of landscape in Legros’s etching oeuvre: “it is not for me to speak of the technical method of the etcher in a place where another has so much higher authority to speak of it: let it only be noted, in passing, that M. Legros, with an evident mastery of the resources of the art, and sometimes an astonishing exercise of it in impressive effects of color, mystery, richness, and relief, unites a tendency (apparent at times even in his painting) to reduce his employment of means beyond a lawful minimum; carrying rapidly to the point of slashing and reserve to the confines of unfinish. He works with equal power on landscape and figure-subjects (142-43).
Left: Le Canal: Effet du Matin (A Canal-Morning). Etching and drypoint in black ink on off-white paper; 63/4 x 101/8 inches (17.0 x 25.7 cm) – sheet size. Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, accession no. CAI.46.. Right: Les Pêcheurs d'écrevisses (The Fishers of Crayfish)
. Etching and drypoint in black ink on off-white paper with extensive brown plate tone; 19 ½ x 15 ⅞ inches (49.5 x 40.2 cm) – plate mark.. Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, accession no. CAI.802.Bibliography
Colvin, Sidney. ”The Etchings of Alphonse Legros.” The Portfolio I (1870): 140-43.
Dodgson, Campbell: A catalogue of the etchings, drypoints and lithographs by Professor Alphonse Legros in the collection of Frank E. Bliss. London, Privately engravinged, 1923.
Monkhouse, Cosmo. “Professor Legros.” The Magazine of Art V (1882): 327-34.
Last modified 25 November 2022