Le Christ Mort, 1888. Oil on canvas, 403/8 x 593/8 inches (102.5 x 151 cm). Collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, accession no. RF 1027.
This painting was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1888, no. 64. It shows a near naked Christ lying supine on his funeral shroud on a rocky outcrop in a bleak landscape. Like Legros’s St. Jerome of 1881 this was a very unusual subject for a painter working in England in the second half of the nineteenth-century. It was a popular subject for the Old Masters, however. His friend Édouard Manet had much earlier in 1864 painted a similar work Les Anges au Tombeau du Christ [The Angels at the Tomb of Christ]. Manet, like Legros, was a great admirer of the work of the Old Masters. Most contemporary reviewers, however, considered Legros’s Le Christ Mort an anachronism and, although a serious work, felt it was not sufficiently idealized in its portrayal of Christ.
F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum liked this picture much less than Legros’s other contribution to this exhibition:
For M. Legros‘s Dead Christ (64) we care much less. It is a life-size, whole-length figure, extended, nearly naked, on a white sheet; its soft full grey tones and death-like pallor have been finely harmonized with the sombre twilight which imperfectly reveals it and the dim landscape of the background. The face by no means lacks pathos or expression, but it is not Christ’s. The picture as a whole, however, unlike most modern representations, is profoundly reverent and very noble; it gains dignity and expressiveness from the breadth, homogeneity, and sombreness of the colour and effect. [636]
The reviewer for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine felt Legros’s representation of the Dead Christ was too realistic and not sufficiently idealized:
Mr. Legros‘s ‘Dead Christ’ is almost too affecting and solemn to be hung among all the impertinences of a picture-gallery. The different lights and shades on the varying texture of the dead flesh are worked out marvellously, but the dead face is perhaps too realistic, wanting in dignity – a true rendering no doubt, in some cases, of the last look of humanity, which is not always an elevated one. But in many cases equally real this is not the case, and the image which takes such a name should surely represent the highest and not the lowest aspect of a human countenance from which life has departed. Sometimes, as everybody knows, nothing can be more majestic and beautiful than a dead face [824-25]
The critic of The Art Journal referred to this work as: “Mr. Legros’s magisterial Dead Christ… Mr. Legros is more classic in the breadth, simplicity, and dignity with which he handles his subject, and separates it from the base and trivial, and even from such sorts of beauty as are distracting or inappropriate to the severity of his ideal. The manner of the modelling of his Dead Christ is very noble and expressive; the landscape surroundings are conceived in the same spirit of solemn, quiet, antique stateliness” (221).
Harry Quilter, the critic of The Spectator, felt this picture would be impossible to live with but couldn’t help admiring it:
Turn from this to Professor Legros‘s ‘Dead Christ,’ a grey, grim, ghastly nude figure, painted in the artist’s most academic manner. Of this it will be true to say that the painter has produced at the same moment a picture with which it would be unbearable to live, and yet which it is impossible not in many ways to admire. The present writer cannot conceive any human being desiring to possess such a work; and yet it makes most things in the Gallery look a little trivial, and more than a little vulgar. At all events, it is a serious work, and, given the painter’s point of view, competent work also. And, since Mr. Legros has not been exhibiting pictures for some years, let us leave it with this final word of commendation. – that at a time when Art is almost entirely devoted to picturesqueness, triviality, affectation, or extravagance, it is a genuine pleasure to welcome a piece of serious, competent work, which makes no hasty bid for popularity, and no melodramatic appeal to our sympathy. [655]
The Illustrated London News, however, found this painting repulsive: “Mr. Legros occupies even more space on the wall than Mr. Halle with his two dark-toned religious pictures, Femmes en Prière (8), two rows of Breton women in a bare church; and a Dead Christ (64) lying on a rock in front of the sepulchre. In neither picture do we see any of that plasticity of which Mr. Legros once gave evidence…In like manner there is nothing in the figure of the dead Christ to suggest any of those higher feelings which a Titian or Rembrandt throws into the subject. It is merely a dead body stretched on its cerement, cold and formal, and but for its utter loneliness would suggest no feeling but that of repulsion” (573).
Bibliography
“Exhibitions.” The Art Journal New Series XXVII (1888): 221-22.“The Pictures of the Year.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine CXLIII (1888) 813-26.
“The New Gallery.” The Illustrated London News XCII (May 26, 1888): 573.
Stephens, Frederic George. “Fine Arts. The New Gallery.” The Athenaeum No. 3160 (May 19, 1888): 635-36.
Quilter, Harry. “Art. The New Gallery.” The Spectator LXI (May 12, 1888): 655-56.
Last modified 11 November 2022