St. Jerome, 1881. Oil on canvas, 423/8 x 691/2 inches (107.6 x 176.4 cm). Collection of Manchester Art Gallery, accession no. 1882.10.
Images of St. Jerome were very common in the work of the Old Masters but it was an uncommon subject for nineteenth-century painters. St. Jerome was a fourth-century Catholic theologian and scholar, best known for his Latin translation of the Bible, the so-called Vulgate Bible. Artists frequently portrayed him as a hermit related to the two-year period he spent from 375 A.D. living and fasting in the desert of Chalcis. His later work translating the Bible resulted in him becoming a doctor of the church and a cardinal. He spent the last thirty-four years of his life living in Palestine.
Legros portrays St. Jerome as an elderly man seated on a rock, naked to the waist, and wearing a white robe. Before him on a flat rock are a large Bible, representing the work he translated from the Hebrew, and a skull. Jerome is frequently portrayed with a skull because it represented the seat of thought and symbolized spiritual perfection. His right arm is outstretched towards the Bible and his eyes are raised towards heaven as if experiencing a divine vision. He is surrounded in the background by a Renaissance-style wooded landscape.
Legros exhibited a study for St. Jerome at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878, no. 10, and the finished painting at the Royal Academy in 1881. When it was shown at the Royal Academy the critic of The Architect noted the influence of the late sixteenth, early sventeenth-century Bolognese school on the painting, possibly Agostino Carracci’s St. Jerome of c.1600: “The next claimant to traditional modes is M. Legros, whose St. Jerome (903) is founded on the Bolognese school; large, forcible, and repulsive, most unhappy in clay-cold color, and merely conventional in feeling, this Academic performance will not raise the artist’s claim to rank as a religious painter” (347). The Art Journal found it ”Well drawn, but dry and hard in colour” (230). F. G. Stephens noted that for once a work by Legros had been hung on the line although not in one of the principal rooms: “His noble St. Jerome (no. 903) now hangs in a good light in the Lecture Room, and in a place good in itself, but hardly so conspicuous as the painting deserved, and which it would not fail to obtain in a country where serious and monumental modes of design are almost instinctively honoured. It is the most important work by an outsider which is yet to come under our notice“ (596). In contrast, the critic of The Builder felt that Legros’s submission was an anachronism: “’St. Jerome’ (Mr. Legros) may be mentioned; the latter work is a fine piece of drawing and painting in the torso of the figure, but it is a kind of painting which seems an anachronism now” (626). The Illustrated London News also found the work but a pale imitation of an Old Master: “M. Legros’ ‘Saint Jerome’ (903) is but a remote approximation to the manner of the old masters at which it aims” (498). Some critics, while not openly hostile to the work, were certainly disinterested. The reviewer for The Saturday Review, for instance, commented: “Mr. Legros’s ‘St. Jerome,’ (903), a large figure which hangs beside Mr. Morris’s landscape, is Academic in character, and leaves the spectator indifferent” (656).
W. E. Henley, in his article on Legros for The Art Journal, praised this work and its Old Masterish qualities: “The very remarkable ‘St. Jerome,’ lately on the line at Burlington house – a picture that, as much for its fine quality of style and the vigorous distinction of its draughtsmanship as for its sober and quite arbitrary scheme of color, reminds one of an old master come a couple of centuries too late” (295).
Bibliography
“Pictures at the Royal Academy -III.” The Architect XXV (May 21, 1881): 347
“The Royal Academy.” New Series XX (1881): 229-31.
“Further Notes at the Royal Academy.” The Builder XL (May 21, 1881): 626.
Henley, W. E. “Alphonse Legros.” The Art Journal New Series XX (1881): 294-96.
“Royal Academy Exhibition.” The Illustrated London News LXXVII (May 21, 1881): 498.
“The Picture Galleries.” The Saturday Review LI (May 21, 1881): 656-57.
Stephens, Frederic George. “Fine Arts. The Royal Academy Exhibition.” The Athenaeum No. 2792 (April 30, 1881): 596-99.
Last modified 14 November 2022