Les Demoiselles du Mois de Marie, 1868. Oil on canvas, 42¼ x 57¾ inches (107.3 x 146.7 cm). Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, accession no. CAI.23, bequeathed by Constantine Ionides in 1901.
This work was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1868, no. 336. It features an elderly bearded priest in a white surplice and red stole in the centre, a young Dominican monk playing the organ to the left. A group of young women to the right are soberly attired in black dresses, with black cloaks or brown or olive-green shawls, and with white caps. The model for the monk playing the organ is the well-known Italian model Alessandro di Marco.
The critic for The Art Journal continued to find Legros’s work eccentric despite his obvious talents: “Legros, in his picture Les Demoiselles du Mois de Marie, has done his best to reconcile us to his ultra, uninviting, and rudely naturalistic style. The manner, which is essentially French, would be strange even in Paris; but there are signs that the artist is prepared to mitigate his chosen method, in order to meet the requirements of the English market. Yet we incline to think tertiaries might be managed with still greater delicacy, and forms made to bend more willingly to grace and beauty. But though this last proof which Legros has given us of his talents may leave much to be desired, yet do we see for the artist the promise of still greater achievements in the future” (280).
The Spectator recognized this picture as one of the most important in the exhibition lamenting that in general the figures in the show were not redeemed by any vitality or earnestness and expression:
For these qualities recourse must be hard to a picture by M. Legros (336), Les Demoiselles du Mois de Marie, a picture with as a little of the prettiness of art as can be imagined. But it’s very severity is in its favour, not only by contrast with its fussier companions in an exhibition, but absolutely as conducive to the full effect of the cloistered scene that it represents, and to the impression of solemnity that surrounds a religious service. In intensity of expression the picture partakes more of the Flemish school of which Leys is the most popular master than of the French school of painters. But, on the one hand, it avoids the heavy vulgar features and the dull small eyes so dear to the Flemish artist, as much as it refuses all relationship, on the other hand, with that sentimental prettiness which is the most odious form of vulgarity, and which is but too familiar in our picture exhibitions. M. Legros paints faces such as all may think they have seen, yet invests them with a meaning and a fervour which lifts them altogether above the common-place. In this picture every head deserves study, but most of all the head of the monk playing on the organ. [1537]
Cosmo Monkhouse remarked favourably upon this painting at the time it was still in the collection of Constantine Ionides:
Of his finest style as a painter, a style which I hope is only laid aside for awhile, our Demoiselles du Mois de Marie is an admiral example, only to be approached, as far as my knowledge of his work extends, by the Baptism belonging to Mr. George Howard, and Mr. Stopford Brooke’s Before the Service. It is dated 1868, and it is to be observed that at this time Legros was extremely careful and finished in execution, was choice and clear in colour, and avoided neither female beauty nor tenderness of expression, though he did not even then go out of his way to meet them. The fresh, pleasant faces of his maids are not of a refinement or a loveliness unsuited to their supposed station, and many as comely a mistress may be found in a French Village. He is a realist still, even in the rapture of the monk, which, finely felt as it is, yet stops short of the transcendental. Nevertheless the picture is a contrast to the depression which animates his later designs. The girls are not all-absorbed in devotion, one even betrays some of the curiosity of her sex; the color, although subdued, is varied and sweet, the hands and heads (beautifully drawn as always) are warm in tone, the dresses rich in shades of brown and green, and the whole harmony is enlivened and completed by the priest’s white surplice and broad red stole. [123]
The National Gallery of Canada has a pencil drawing drawing entitled Monk Playing the Organ of c.1865-70, accession no. 37567, that might possibly relate to this painting.
Bibliography
“Dudley Gallery. Cabinet Pictures in Oils.” The Art Journal New Series VII (1868): 280.
Monkhouse, Cosmo. “The Constantine Ionides Collection. The Realists.” The Magazine of Art VII (1884): 120-27.
“Art. Winter Exhibitions.” The Spectator XLI (December 26, 1868): 1536-37.
Last modified 11 November 2022