LEGROS. “COMMUNION DANS GLISE ST. MÉDARD.
rather, very often, his vision of the deeper realities which underlie whatever may attract us on the surface.
Legros has been concerned—and best of all concerned in etching—with many departments of Art. Like Mr. G. F. Watts, he has been fascinated, here and again, and very specially, by masculine intellect and character; masculine kindness, goodness, genius, energy. Of Mr. Watts himself—and fortunately in the medium of etching—he has made the happiest of all possible portraits, finding in the theme a gravity of manly beauty, a charm of approaching age, to which he has always been intensely sympathetic. Gambetta, too, and Sir Frederic Leighton, and Cardinal Manning—who, if he appealed to him at all, must have appealed to him on the side of austerity alone—have been the subjects of Legro etched portraiture. To each portrait he has given, though in very different measures, according as the subject wanted it, a nobility and dignity supplied by his own art and temperament, and by a sense of Style nourished upon the study of the Renaissance and of Rembrandt. And, on the other hand, upon each selected model whom he has treated in those other etchings which are not confessedly portraiture, he has bestowed the grave veracity, the verisimilitude of the portrait.
Hardly any of Legro work is dated, and, as time has passed, the changes in his method have not been very marked, though it is hardly to the earliest etching that we must go for his most trained draughtsmanship and most accomplished technique. On the other hand, the early work has about it a sometimes savage earnestness, a rapid and immediate expressiveness, a weirdness also, which are immensely impressive. Poetic and pathetic is it besides, sometimes to the last degree. “Les Chantres Espagnols,” for example, is the creation of a great artist: a most penetrating and pathetic study of physical and mental decay. It represents eight priestly singing men lifting up what hoarse and feeble voices they may be possessed of, in the hushed choir, by the uncertain light of torches, in the nigh most mysterious and most ominous hour.
Several among the more fascinating of these somewhat early etchings and dry-points record the life of the priesthood. In its visible dignity, its true but limited camaraderie, in its monotony and quietude, in its magnificence of service and symbol, the life of the priest, and of those who serve in a great church, has impressed Legros profoundly, and he has etched these men—one now reading a lesson, one waiting now with folded hands, one meditative, one observant, and now one offering up the
LEGROS. “LA MORT ET LA BÛCHERON.”
Host, and now another bending over the violoncello with slow movement of the hand that holds the bow. Dignity and ignorance, pomp and power, weariness, senility, decay, and almost squalor—nothing has escaped him. In Literature, only a Balzac could have done equal justice to that which attracts, and to that which must needs repel.