Un Pèlerinage, 1871. Oil on canvas, 54 x 89 inches (137.2 x 226 cm). Collection of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, accession no. WAG 3090.
This was the first of the two works that Legros showed at the Royal Academy in 1872. Later that same year he again exhibited it at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition of Pictures. The painting depicts a solemn group of women, both elderly and young, seated upon benches in contemplation with some praying, before a shrine in the French countryside.
Un Pèlerinage received mixed reviews, the point of several being that despite the painter’s obvious great skill and sincerity, his “obtrusive asceticism,” as the The Illustrated London News put it, is an "affectation." The reviewer for the The Illustrated London News, began by pointing out the similarity of the two paintings Legros exhibited at the Royal Academy: “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.” The reviewer then proceeded to explain that ”The Pèlerinage represents a religious sisterhood or party of Beguines before a shrine of the Virgin or a Calvary. The women are dressed in sooty black cloaks, and hideous blue-white caps, partly resembling the cerements of the dead, and partly a poke-bonnet. Their common, ill-favoured visages are scarcely redeemed into pathetic interest by their expression of the devout submission to hopeless religious routine. A cripple, of most forbidding aspect, stands behind.”
Next, the reviewer makes several points that appear in various forms throughout criticism of Legros’s paintings, the first of which is that the artist’s great skill far surpasses the “Academic performances” on display. The reviewer, like many others, praises the artist’s sincerity, but then criticizes Legros’s subject and its treatment for what the reviewer takes to be its off-putting ugliness:
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]
The critic of The Academy, who also didn't like Un Pèlerinage, was unusual because he pointed out what he took to be technical problems in the work: “the virile force which Legros has put into his ‘Pèlerinage’ breaks down through the river and reeds below, and crushes them and drives them out of sight utterly” (185).
The critic of The Art Journal took yet a different approach, concentrating, as did critics of his other works, on Legros as an example of French painting, painting that differs markedly from English art. He also pointed out Un Pèlerinage is "the only composition in the exhibition based on the simple principles that governed the studies of the earliest painters. Those uncompromising whites and blacks ignore entirely those rules of practice which have been in force for centuries, but which are now not infrequently repudiated in the universal straining after what is considered originality” (153).
F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum was more complimentary in his comments finding the work a profoundly pathetic and religious design:
Un Pèlerinage (184), by M. Legros, the halt of a party of the devotees at a praying-station, or Calvary, is a grave and sad picture. The party consists of women, old and young, whose simple, earnest and quaint faces are intensely pathetic, and one man, who is rather far advanced in years, and a cripple; the women wear black cloaks with white hoods. At the feet of one of them lies a large basket of provisions or offerings, together with some doves. The picture is a little hard, as M. Legros is apt make his works, but it’s solemnity and breath of colouring, not less than the fine feeling for expression it exhibits, and its largeness of style, are precious qualities. The figures of the women are rather uncouth, not to say dumpy, and to this result the bulky costume contributes not a little; yet, on the other hand, we are bound to remember that this very ungracefulness adds to the homely and naïve pathos of the design. The face of the girl who sits on the further end of the bench is very beautiful in expression, but by no means so in its features… The art of M. Legros may be said to descend direct from the pathetic school of the Low Countries in its severer forms and most devout mode of expression, enriched by traditions of a system of colouring which alone is unspeakably valuable, and is, in his mind at least, exalted by modern refinement and by knowledge of the noblest Italian design. M. Legros is a painter who looking to nature and caring not to select, does not flinch from this or that, of expression, design or form, because it is homely. He will accept with gladness most things that are pathetic, all things that afford opportunities of broad, sober, yet rich and subtly graded color. Give him Nature, and he will put into the broad cheeks and round eyes of a Walloon girl something which, the more you look at it, the more it takes hold of you. [596]
In contrast to the earlier reviewers other than Stephens, Rimbault Dibdin had high praise for the painting when reviewing the collection of the Walker Art Gallery in 1889: “The distinction, the individuality of the picture, are evidenced by the difficulty of passing, without a sense of some hiatus, from it to any other in the collection – even to one so elevated in conception and admirable in technique as The Pilgrimage, by Professor A. Legros. This work, presented by Mr. P. H. Rathbone, represents a group of Breton women kneeling before a shrine, their faces suffused with various expressions of awe, reverence, and devout faith. The subtle characterization of the different ages and types, the noble lines of the composition, and the beauty of the grave and restrained colour-scheme are alike remarkable” (55).
Bibliography
“The Exhibition of The Royal Academy.” The Academy III (1872): 184-85.
“The Royal Academy.” The Art Journal New Series XI (June 1, 1872): 149-56.
“The Royal Academy.” The Illustrated London News LX (May 25, 1872): 502.
Dibdin, E. Rimbault. “The Liverpool Corporation Collection. The Walker Art Gallery.” The Magazine of Art XII (1882): 50-56. Stephens, Frederic George. “The Royal Academy.” The Athenaeum No. 2324 (May 11, 1872): 595-98.Last modified 16 November 2022