Les Chantres Espagnols (The Spanish Cantors). Etching on off-white paper, printed by Delatre.1 05/8 x 149/16 inches (26.7 x 36.8 cm). Click on image to enlarge it.
Les Chantres Espagnols [The Spanish Cantors], also known as Le Lutrim, is an early large etching by Legros. It was printed by Delatre and published by Cadart and Luquet in Eaux-fortes modernes, publiées par la Société des Aquafortistes 3 (January 1865), no. 141. The same year this was published Legros exhibited the painting A Spanish Choir [Le Lutrin] at the Royal Academy, which would appear to be the same composition as the etching. F. G. Stephens in describing the painting in The Athenaeum did not feel it enhanced Legros’s reputation: “M. Legros, whose picture of last year made some impression, will not advance in public estimation by Le Lutrin, - priests at the lectern, - although it has a large and broad style; it is flat; the faces are needlessly dull in expression” (658). The critic of The Illustrated London News did not find this an effective work either: “’The Lutrin,’ by M. Legros - a group of priests chanting the office from the raised desk or lectern, which gives the title to the picture (as a does also to the famous poem by Boileau) – is excellent as regards breadth and phyalognomic truth, though rather flat and ineffective” (451).
Les Chantres Espagnols was an early work by Legros, done prior to 1861. It depicts a group of Spanish cantors, who were leaders of prayer, sitting together in a monastery. There are eight cantors in the church choir. The first four are seated to the right in stalls holding candlesticks with short candles in their hands. The others are standing and one of them turns the page of a missal placed on a lectern and lights it with a long lamp with two burners. The cantors appear to be rehearsing because two of the monks are standing at the lectern reading from a large book, likely a copy of the Gospels. The scene is dark, with the monks in their black robes shrouded in the shadows of the stone room. Legros has used a very heavy black line with very few white spaces left blank on the paper. Only the candle flames, the Gospel, and some of the monks' faces have been etched with a light line and some white space. The darkness of the space was apparently used to convey the seriousness of the cantors' duty as leaders in prayer. Although Legros was apparently not a conventionally religious man, by the later 1860s he had become noted for his religious scenes both in painting and etching. As Wedmore pointed out, “The early work has about it a sometimes savage earnestness, a rapid and immediate expressiveness, a weirdness also, which is 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 night’s most mysterious and most ominous hour” (66).
Although one of Legros’s most celebrated prints it is definitely eccentric, if not downright weird. Vincent Van Gogh held this etching in high regard. In a letter of February 5, 1883 to his brother Theo he compared it to the black and white work of Legros’ friend Leon Lhermitte that he also admired: “He was compared with Legros too, but only with the most outstanding, most excellent drawings or etchings by Legros, which are also very vigorous and broad, for example the pew.”
Bibliography
Dodgson, Campbell: A catalogue of the etchings, drypoints and lithographs by Professor Alphonse Legros in the collection of Frank E. Bliss. London, 1923, no. 59.
“Fine Arts. Exhibition of the Royal Academy.” The Illustrated London News XLVI (May 13, 1865): 451.
Salaman, Malcolm C.: The Great Painter-Etchers from Rembrandt to Whistler. The Studio Ltd., London, 1914.
Stephens, Frederic George. “Fine Arts. Royal Academy.” The Athenaeum. No. 1959 (May 13, 1865): 657-58.
The website of the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tonga, https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/41627.
Wedmore, Frederick. Etching in England. London: George Bell and Sons, 1895.
Last modified 18 November 2022