Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849), the American writer and poet best known for “The Raven,” his invention of the detective story, and several short stories dealing with the macabre, had a far greater reputation in France than in his native America. Charles Baudelaire translated these tales into French by in the mid-1850s, which is where Legros would have encountered them. Like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James Whistler, Poe had an effect on Legros’s art, particularly his etchings created early in his career prior to his move to London in 1863.
Left: The Pit and the Pendulum. Second plate. 1861. Etching on ivory laid paper, Plate: 26.5 × 36.7 cm (10 7/16 × 14 ½ in.); Sheet: 27.4 × 37.2 cm (10 13/16 × 14 11/16 in.) . Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago (1985.963), Marjorie B. Kovler Print Fund. Right: Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat). Etching in black ink on off-white paper, c.1860-61; 10¼ x 14¼ inches (26.1 x 36.2 cm). Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, accession no. CAI.180, Constantine Ionides bequest. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Cosmo Monkhouse has commented on Legros’s morbid etchings illustrating the tales of Poe: ”The depth of horror to which he can descend is shown by some illustrations to Poe’s most gruesome tales, such as “The Pit and The Pendulum” and “The Black Cat,” and by his design of a group of unwholesomely curious savants experimenting on a corpse with a galvanic battery. Such a determination to the black side of things must be constitutional. It is to be doubted whether even his gloomy view of the life of the poor can be accounted for entirely by its experience” (331).
Bibliography
Dodgson, Campbell: A catalogue of the etchings, drypoints and lithographs by Professor Alphonse Legros in the collection of Frank E. Bliss. London: Printed for Private Circulation, 1923, cat. no. 80.
Monkhouse, Cosmo. “Professor Legros.” The Magazine of Art V (1882): 327-34.
Salaman, Malcolm C.: The Great Painter-Etchers from Rembrandt to Whistler. London: The Studio Ltd., 1914.
Created 21 November 2022