Le Repas des Pauvres, 1877. Oil on canvas 44½ x 56¼ inches (113.0 x 142.9 cm). Collection of Tate Britain, accession no. NO2898.
This was one of ten works that Legros exhibited at the second Grosvenor Gallery exhibition held in 1878. It shows three men seated at a table being served a humble meal reflective of Legros’s longstanding commitment to Social Realism under the influence of his early mentor Gustave Courbet. English painters were also involved in this movement to draw attention to the poverty and hardships of working class people such as G. F. Watt’s The Irish Famine of 1848-50, Ford Madox Brown’s Work of 1852-65, Henry Wallis’s The Stonebreaker of 1857, and Luke Fildes’s Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward of 1874. Legros’s painting is reminiscent of his former friend James Whistler’s early etching Soupe a Trois Sous of 1859.
Left: The Irish Famine by George Frederic Watts RA (1817-1904). 1850<. Oil on canvas. 198 x 180.3 cm. Courtesy the Watts Gallery, Compton. Middle: Work. Ford Madox Brown. 1852-65. Oil on canvas, arched top, 53 15/16 x 77 11/16 in. Manchester City Art Galleries./span>. Right: The Stonebreaker. Henry Wallis. 1857. Oil on canvas, 253/4 x 31 inches (65.4 x 78.7 cm). Collection of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, accession number 1936P506., 1874. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Surprisingly, in view of its subject matter espousing Legros’s socialist political sympathies, this work was bought by George and Rosalind Howard. Howard early in his career as an artist, on the advice of Burne-Jones, had received private tutelage from Legros and the two had remained friends. Rosalind Howard, the Countess of Carlisle, presented the painting to the Tate Gallery in 1912.
When Le Repas des Pauvres was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery it was not widely reviewed, perhaps because of its subject matter and its almost monochromatic sombre palette. The reviewer for The Illustrated London News was an exception calling the work: “a most pathetic interior with figures, called Le Repas des Pauvres (44). Seldom have grinding poverty and partially satisfied hunger been so truthfully delineated as in this picture. You feel glad that the poor old men ‘supping their sowens’ have got something to eat and drink; yet you feel the repast is at the best a meagre one, and that they ought to have something more succulent and more nourishing to recruit their failing strength. They look so dreadfully poor!” (411).
W. E. Henley, commenting on the nature of Legros’s art with relation to his works of social realism and religious observation, stated:
His good gifts are many and great. He is rich in sentiment and dignity. His imagination is not less active and vigorous within its limits that in itself it is virile and austere. The sober elegance of his invention makes ample amends for his lack of abundance. He is often meagre, often unattractive, often severe, often ascetic; but he is never vulgar, nor cheap, nor common, for, as has already been noted, he has the rare qualities of purity and elevation of style. His color, which is not remarkably unconventional, (to say the least of it), is always quiet, harmonious, and sufficient, and is often rich and personal in a very marked degree. His design, at once imaginative and exact, is quick with energy and distinction, and tinged with a kind of intellectual passion almost unknown, and certainly unparalleled, in the work of contemporary draftsman…And, as his method is academical, so is his inspiration mainly realistic and popular. His imagination is more melancholy, and incomparably less epic, than Millet’s; his sentiment is far less poetical and far more pure aesthetic…But his work is that of one who knows much and feels deeply, and who has an appreciation for what is dignified and noble in common life, which is nonetheless generous and earnest in itself for being austere and reserved an expression. His models are, for the most part, selected types of the ordinary in humanity; his themes are mostly found in one or other of the simple duties and functions which make up experience for their kind; and his treatment of those materials – which is, like Millet’s, the reverse of anecdotic and sentimental - is unfailingly lofty in intention, and impressive and ennobling, if also somewhat saddening in effect. His fishers and his farmers, his women at worship and his monks at study or at prayer, have an interest, indeed, that is far stronger and higher than is in the power of mere story to bestow. They are representative of certain elements of human fortune; and the emotions they embody are emotions common to us all, and as old and inextinguishable as the race. [295-96]
Bibliography
“The Grosvenor Gallery.” The Illustrated London News LXXII (May 4, 1878): 410-11.
Henley, W. E. “Alphonse Legros.” The Art Journal New Series XX (1881): 294-96
Last modified 11 November 2022