Le Chaudronnier, 1874. Oil on canvas, 451/4 x 521/8 inches (115 x 132.5 cm). Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, accession no. CAI.24.
The fact tat this painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1874, the Paris Salon in 1875, and the first Grosvenor Gallery exhibition in 1877 obviously meant that Legros considered it a major work in his oeuvre. Its title when exhibited at the Paris Salon was Le Chaudronnier ou le Rétameur de Campagne [The Field Tinker]. It is one of the finest of Legros’s social realist paintings of the 1870s where he shows his sympathy for the plight of the poor. This picture is reminiscent of the work of French Realist painters of contemporary life like Gustav Courbet and Jean-François Millet.
The painting shows a French tinker seated on a grassy bank repairing a cauldron and surrounded by other metal pots in need of repair. A clump of trees is in the background to the left while a cottage can be seen faintly in the distance to the right. Similar paintings by Legros from this time period dealing with the plight of the impoverished and with humble everyday activities included his Le Repas des Pauvres of 1877 and La Tombée du Jour ou le Promeneur Fatigué [The Fall of Day or the Tired Walker] of 1878. Constantine Alexander Ionides purchased Le Chaudronnier in 1874 and later bequeathed it with the rest of his collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
This picture attracted favourable notices from critics when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1874. The Art Journal lamented that this work was skied at the exhibition making it impossible to fully assess its merits:
No painter has been more unjustly dealt with by those entrusted with the disposition of the exhibited pictures than A. Legros. In the lecture-room a clever picture from his hand is hung close to the ceiling, and here ‘Un Chaudronnier’ (24) is put so far out of sight that its sterling merits are in danger of being overpassed. This is assuredly strange treatment of an artist who never produces careless work, and whose pictures whatever other attractions they may lack, always possess the enduring excellence of sound and highly cultivated execution. For correctness and unobtrusive realism of style, nothing in the Gallery can claim superiority over this picture of a workman surrounded with metal vessels he is engaged in repairing. The incidence of light upon rounded surfaces of copper and brass was never realized with more exact fidelity. [162]
F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum was fulsome in his praise for the painting while again lamenting its hanging:
M. Legros sends Un Chaudronnier (24), and another picture which we will consider presently. The former is among the artistic productions of the year, although it has no more ambitious subject than an old itinerant French tinker at work on a copper pan, while he sits by a wayside gravely and patiently hammering; his portable forge is by his side; three trees rise behind the figure. These elements are made into a picture by the artist, was given the charm of earnest expression to the man’s worn, but not sorrowful face, added rich color, superbly solid painting, and chiaroscuro such as Velasquez might enjoy. The Royal Academy accommodations have, it would seem, yet to make the acquaintance, or at least to learn to respect these fine qualities of art, to say nothing of the genius of this remarkable artist. Ignorance of art and the man is the only honest apology they can offer for the ignominious place in which the hangers - let those by no means numerous gentleman divide the responsibility of it between them – have placed this fine work: above the line, not in a good light, and in a second-rate room; while, in the better places, are acres of gaudy, sentimental trash, such as these very hangers are quite well educated enough to reject if asked to take it to their own homes, where they might not be sorry to welcome the picture of M. Legros. It is useless to offer the usual idle and false excuses for this injustice, e.g., that the scale of the picture is large, so that the work does not suffer, nay requires, to be hung at a distance from the eye, while, at that elevation, the trash could not be seen at all. The fact is that M. Legros is a foreigner, and ‘has no friends’ in the old school sense of the phrase, so everybody’s friends are served before the stranger gets a place. This is probably the main reason; but there must be a good deal of sheer ignorance at work in these cases. [638]
When this work was shown at the Grosvenor Gallery a critic for The Spectator linked the subject not to French Realism but to the Idyllists:
Of the large works by M. Legros, No. 78 is in our opinion, by far the best, and is indeed as fine a specimen of what may be called the Idyllic school as we have ever seen. Le Chaudronnier, so it is called, it’s not idyllic in the sense of Mr. Boughton‘s nymphs and pale muslin draperies, but in telling a simple incident of every-day rural life as it might have actually occurred in all essential respects, and yet imbuing it with a subtle flavour of pathos and poetry. This old tinker, who sits mending copper saucepans in the shade with his coat off, is certainly no heroic figure, but still M. Legros has found something of the heroic in him, and shown it us, for he has selected no picturesque, careless vagabond, no broken-down old man, with silver hair and tottering steps, and has surrounded him with no theatrically effective accessories, but has given us an ordinary man, at work in a very every-day landscape and in a very every-day manner. The painter has had the perception to grasp the fact that the work itself was the element of pathos or interest, and the picture simply records how an old tinker mended his pots methodically under a tree one summer afternoon, and interests us accordingly. [664]
Cosmo Monkhouse, writing in The Magazine of Art in 1884, greatly admired this painting when he saw it in the Ionides’ collection. He also quoted critic Philip Hamerton’s opinion of the artist in his appraisal of Legros:
I prefer to quote the words of another, which aptly describe his position in the ranks of the realists. Mr. Hamerton, in the Portfolio for August, 1873, justly remarked: ‘Never was any realism so remarkable for simplicity of purpose as that of the genuine French rustic school. I do not mean the realism of the revolutionary realists, who called themselves so, but of that school which was entirely emancipated from classical authority, and used this liberty for the plain expression of its sentiment, not for the illustration of a theory. These artists were neither influenced by the authority of the classics, nor by the force of the reaction against them; they worked in a calm corner of their own, safe from the flux and reflux of the great currents of their time. Mr. Legros is one of them, but, instead of going among the oxen and the labourers in the fields, he prefers the solemnity of the village church, or the cathedral aisle, or the quiet monastery; and there he will watch his models, who know not that they are watched, and who reveal to him the secret of their meditations.’
Of the pictures by Alphonse Legros in the possession of Mr. Ionides, the best known is one in which the artist has gone, if not among the labourers of the fields, at least among those by the wayside. The Chaudronnier or Tinker, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874, at the Salon in 1875, and at the Grosvenor in 1877. It belongs to the same order of solemn studies of human labour as many of Legros’ etchings, and as the picture of the ‘Brûleur d’Herbes’ [Burning the Grasses] exhibited at the Grosvenor in 1881. The ‘Tinker” is perhaps his best work of this kind. With his finely-painted vessels of brass and copper it is more attractive, and less conventional in color, than the Brûleur d’Herbes, and in this and other respects it marks an intermediate stage between his work at the time of which Mr. Hamerton writes and the broad suggestiveness with which he has been content of late years. [123]
Bibliography
“The Royal Academy.” The Art Journal New Series XIII (1874): 161-66.
Monkhouse, Cosmo. “The Constantine Ionides Collection. The Realists.” The Magazine of Art VII (1884): 120-27.
“The Grosvenor Gallery.” The Spectator L (May 26, 1877): 664-65.
Stephens, Frederic George. “The Royal Academy.” The Athenaeum, No. 2428 (May 9, 1874): 637-39.
Last modified 11 November 2022