Noël,’ perhaps the best picture he painted.
In 1855 Legros attended the evening classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and acquired there a lifelong love of drawing from the antique; some of these studies, done at various periods in chalk and in gold-point, are in the British Museum print room.
Legros sent to the Salon of 1857 two portraits; one was rejected and was sent to the exhibition of protest organised by Bonvin in his studio; the other, which was accepted, was a profile portrait of his father, a beardless head recalling the Erasmus, now in the museum at Tours, presented by the artist when his friend Cazin was conservateur. Champfleury, who noticed the work in the Salon, sought out the artist and enlisted him in the group of so-called ‘Realists,’ a school of protest against the academical trifles of the degenerate Romantics. Legros was already associated with men like Bonvin, Bracquemond, Fantin-Latour, Manet, and Ribot, and was dubbed ‘Realist’ more because it was the war-cry for the time than for any other reason. Legros thus won the support of Baudelaire, Champfleury, and Durantez, who hoped for a revival of art through the young ‘realists.’ He appears in Fantin-Latour's well-known group of portraits called ‘Hommage à Delacroix.’
In 1859 Legros's ‘Angelus’ was in the Salon, the first of those quiet church interiors with kneeling figures of patient women by which he is best known in England. It was in the collection of Sir Francis Seymour Haden [q. v. Suppl. II] Baudelaire, in an article devoted to this little masterpiece, called Legros a religious painter gifted with the sincerity of the old masters. ‘Ex Voto,’ a work of great power, painted in 1861, and now in the Museum of Dijon, was received by his friends with enthusiasm, but only got a mention at the Salon. During this period Legros made his living by the occasional sale of his etchings and lithographs, and by private teaching. A pupil, son of M. de Laborde, Directeur des Archives, took him for a fortnight's tour through Catalonia in Spain. He saw nothing of the Galleries, but in the Louvre he had come under the influence of the Spanish school, and the Spanish places and people now excited his imagination and sympathy. ‘Le Lutrin,’ exhibited in 1863, had no better success than ‘Ex Voto’; it was very badly hung, but the same picture with one figure painted out obtained a medal in 1868. Legros's reputation was confined to a narrow circle, and at the time that ‘Le Lutrin’ was painted he, according to Dalou, was in a state of great poverty, disheartened, ill, living in dread of creditors, although not ‘devoid of that saving quality of humour, which never left him.’
Encouraged by James Abbott McNeill Whistler [q. v. Suppl. II], who heartened him with the hope of finding work in London, Legros left France for England in 1863. Not wholly unknown, he was welcomed with great kindness by Dante Gabriel Rossetti [q. v.] and George Frederick Watts [q. v. Suppl. II] At first he lived by his etching and by teaching. On the recommendation of (Sir) Edward Poynter he was appointed teacher of etching at the South Kensington School of Art, and his success in that post led to his election in 1875 to the Slade professorship of fine art at University College, London. Leighton, Burton, Poynter, and Watts supported his candidature. A few years later he became a naturalised British subject. He remained professor till 1892, and among the many young artists who came under his care were Mr. Henry Tuke, Mr. Thomas Gotch, Charles Furse, William Strang, who was his most faithful disciple, Countess Féodora Gleichen, Miss Hallé, (Sir) Charles Holroyd, and Miss Swainson. Legros encouraged truth of character and severity in the work of his pupils, with a simple technique and a respect for the traditions of the old masters after the manner of the schools of Raphael and the Carracci. He painted before the students, and would draw before them from the life and from the antique. All varieties of art work were practised: sculpture, modelling, decoration, etching, medal-making and even gem-engraving. As Legros had casually picked up the art of etching by watching a comrade in Paris working at a commercial engraving, so he began making medals after studying Pisanello in the British Museum and the Cabinet des Médailles.
Much of Legros's work outside his class-room continued to bear trace of the rebellious romantic spirit of his youth. Such is the characteristic of his etchings from Edgar Allan Poe, the ‘Bonhomme Misère,’ and ‘La Mort du Vagabond.’ In his last years, after he had resigned the professorship, he etched in the early spirit ‘Le Triomphe de la Mort,’ and beautiful idyls of fishermen by willow-lined streams, labourers in the fields, farms in Burgundy, and castles in Spain. In 1897, at the instance of S. Arthur Strong [q. v. Suppl. II],
