Alphonse Legros

Of French birth, Alphonse Legros forged a reputation as an etcher in Paris in the 1860s and cemented it in England, where he spent the greater part of his mature career. As a boy, he served as an apprentice to a sign painter in Dijon. He then worked as a theatre decorator in Dijon and later in Lyon and Paris, before embarking on more formal artistic education in the French capital in the 1850s. In Paris, Legros trained with the influential drawing master, Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran (1802–97), who was noted for encouraging subjectivity and memory in the creative process. He also enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1855.
While at the Ecole, Legros’s interest in etching quickly developed to the point where, seven years later, he was able to persuade publisher Alphonse Cadart to establish the Société des Aquafortistes in 1862. An accomplished painter and modeller of a darkly realist bent, it was Legros’s advocacy of etching as an evocative original artform, uniquely suited to the French Romantic sensibility, that won him friends in French literary circles, notably the Symbolist writer Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). He also gained the attention of anglophone artists, such as James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), with whom he created the Société des Trois along with the ‘realist’ painter Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904).

At Whistler’s urging, Legros visited London, where he remained the rest of his life and continued to be admired by critics and fellow artists on both sides of the Channel. Appointed Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School in 1876, he held this role until 1893, during which time he enshrined his interests in etching and modelling into the curriculum. A champion of both media, Legros was a founder-member of the Society of Painter-Etchers in 1881 and of the Society of Medallists in 1885.