Un Prêche, 1871. Oil on canvas, 30 x 37¾ inches (76.2 x 95.9 cm). Collection of the Scottish National Gallery, accession no. NG 1623.
This work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1872. The picture shows a group, primarily young French women, seated in the interior of a dimly lit church and listening to a sermon being delivered by a monk. The critic for The Art Journal commented favourably: “Un Prêche (1,140) is a good and well-studied composition, wherein appears a monk preaching to a small congregation of women and girls; the manner of the picture is firm and confident”(201). F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum particularly admired its colouring: “In Un Prêche (1140), by Mr. A. Legros, there is a grave charm in the expressions of the audience of women; it is admirable for its sober and strong colouring” (661).
The critic of The Illustrated London News, however, failed to find either beauty or interest in Legros’s two submissions to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1872 and questioned his motives for painting such subjects in the first place:
’Un Pèlerinage’ (184) and ‘Un Prêche’ (1,140) apparently prove by their close resemblance to each other and many proceeding works that M. Legros’s art runs in a rather narrow groove...Now, we would wish to entertain the highest respect for all that is sincerely grave and earnest in art. A painter who succeeds in engaging our sympathies for the ugly and the sad may deserve the highest praise; and certainly there is a degree of knowledge and soundness in M. Legros’s work, which is not approached by nine-tenths of the Academic performances in this collection. Yet à quoi bon? we ask these ugly and funereal representations with a moral so obscure and so entire an avoidance of even technical charm? One comes to think that this obtrusive asceticism may, in art as in life, be the cloak to affectation as great, and pride as intense, as that which proclaims itself from these walls in the loudest self-assertion of flashy conventionality. [502]
In 1881 W. E. Henley in The Art Journal discussed the art of Alphonse Legros and answered The Illustrated London News’ question as to what is the point of these “ugly and funereal representations”:
There are painters and painters. Some are able to do no more than make pictures, and are content provided that, year by year, they can colour over a given quantity of canvas in such a manner as to make it vendible. Others find in painting a means of personal expression, and produce in obedience to a certain spiritual impulse, and to the satisfaction of a certain imaginative and intellectual need…The men of the second class are artists; they paint because they must, and inasmuch as they have something in them which they can put out and no other way. Professor Legros is one of these latter. He has been accused, and with good show of reason, of being lacking in charm, and too constant an exponent of the aesthetics of melancholy and the unbeautiful. But he is an artist among artists – an artist to his fingers’ ends. He works to give peculiar and individual expression to an individual and peculiar view of truth; and from the pursuit of this object he has never once turned aside during the whole of his laborious career. [294]
Bibliography
“The Royal Academy.” The Art Journal New Series XI (1872): 201-03.
Henley, W. E. “Alphonse Legros.” The Art Journal New Series XX (1881): 294-96.
Stephens, Frederic George. “The Royal Academy.” The Athenaeum No. 2326 (May 25, 1872): 657-62.
“The Royal Academy Exhibition.” The Illustrated London News LX (May 25, 1872): 502.
Last modified 13 November 2022