Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS.

NEW SERIES.-No. 26.

M. ALPHONSE LEGROS,

SLADE PROFESSOR OF FINE ARTS AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE. M. ALPHONSE LEGROS, "the Alceste of painting," as he has been happily styled, was born at Dijon in 1837. He comes of a middle-class race, and is a true son of the streets; but he has farmer cousins, and in his town breeding there is a rich dash of the peasant, a strong smack of the farmhouse and the fields. His parents were poor, and he was one of a large family, so that he grew as best he could, and learned nothing but what he taught himself. It is to be conjectured that, in the case of the future painter of the "Ex-Voto" and the "Répas des Pauvres," that natural and unconscious education of the imagination and the eye, which is common to all children, was uncommonly complete and characteristic. Just as Millet drew mainly for his art on the experiences and associations he had assimilated while he was yet a peasant, so does it seem that in the life of Dijon and its environs the little Legros found much that was afterwards to be of special use to himself and of special interest to the world. After Millet, none has painted the poor of France so faithfully and well, with such an intimate understanding of the species and the individual, as Legros. With those strong and simple types of the Ordinary and the Common-place, those representative fractions of subaltern humanity, to whose presentment he is addicted, he must from the first have been familiar. As he saw them long ago, he sees them now. Working and eating, worshipping and resting, the men and women of his boyhood have served him in a hundred compositions. At church and at plough, at market and at confession, hewing and reading and netting, mourning and rejoicing, angling and boating and hedging, living and dying-he has drawn them with such an austere affection, such a severe and yet profound appreciation of what in them is dignified and noble, as could only be found in one originally of themselves. The large and manly melancholy that informs his treatment of the poor and their environment, whether urban or champaign, is that of a true child of the people. Such a masterpiece of the Sordid-Pathetic as the "Procession Dans les Caveaux de Saint-Médard," in which the shabby-genteel is

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]
[merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[graphic][merged small][merged small][subsumed]
« AnteriorContinuar »