Legros, Alphonse (1837-1911)
Tête d’homme regardant vers le haut et de côté (Head of a man looking upwards and sideways)
pre 1877
Oil on canvas, 21 × 17.7 in
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Alphonse Legros (1837-1911) was born in Dijon where he entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts before attending the ‘Petite Ecole’ of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran (1802-1897) in Paris and then Ecole des Beaux-Arts he started exhibited at the Salon in 1857. In 1863, Legros visited London where he found admirers and patrons, notably the Ionides family, and was ardently promoted by the brothers Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti. An etcher, a painter and a sculptor, he succeeded Edward John Poynter (1836-1919) at the Slade School in 1876 and was naturalized as a British citizen in 1880.
This work is a fine example of Legros‘ timed head-studies, a method he developed while lecturing at the Slade School. This oil sketch was directly drawn and painted after the model in about an hour and a half before an audience of young pupils. The artist gave this portrait to the Museum, probably to enrich its collections of educational materials as the V&A at the time called South Kensington Museum included a School of Design. (V&A)