LOS ANGELES, CA.- Known only through dated black and white photographs, L’angelus, by Alphonse Legros was believed lost for decades. One of Legros’s – and indeed the mid-nineteenth century’s - most storied paintings, L’angelus was also the artist’s first major religious painting and a powerful example of his acclaimed Realist style. The lavish attention it received from the notoriously discriminating art critic Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) at its debut at the Paris Salon of 1859 was made all the more remarkable due to the staggering number of rejections and instances of scathing criticism that plagued an unprecedented number of other works and artists at this particular venue in 1859. Singled out for praise by numerous subsequent commentators, first in France and later in England, America, and Europe, and housed in some of the art world’s best-known and most discerning early twentieth-century private collections, the reappearance of L’angelus in 2016 is indisputably a monumental episode in the annals of modern art history. It now resides in an important private American collection. The new owner plans to share it via museum exhibitions with the public.

The subject of Legros’s picture was not in itself revolutionary, nor was it unfamiliar to contemporary audiences. Indeed, in the same year that Legros painted his L’angelus, Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) created his own tribute to this daily religious ritual, in a work of the same name (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).[iv] Though similar to Legros’s in spirit, with its stark format and focus on French peasant life,[v] the universal monumentality inherent in Millet’s painting stands fundamentally apart from Legros’s own ambitions and intent. Awkward and unidealized, the figures in L’angelus evoke a naïve and sentimental archaism, and a new, emotive Realism that did not go unnoticed by Legros’s peers:

At the Salon of 1859 Legros exhibited his Angelus, a picture full of austere and sober inspiration, not calculated to attract crowds, but which drew round the artist a little nucleus of warm admirers, almost exclusively painters. The absolute truthfulness of the types and the scrupulous observation of nature, both in the modelling and colour, gave to M. Legros an eminent position in the group of artists who study reality above all things. But the expression of the faces and the naïve and earnest devotion which characterised the picture gave it quite an independent position . . . M. Legros, by uniting a passionate study of expression to a literal translation of nature, showed the vice of [the tendency of the Realist school to ignore the passing emotions of the human soul], whilst exhibiting at the same time, in the highest degree, the very real qualities advocated by the school . . . although the artist has not borrowed his subject from a text of sacred history, he has sought an emotion of sincere piety which is not often found in the official pictures ordered for our churches, but the secret of which may be discovered in the Florentine frescoes of the fifteenth century (René Ménard, “Alphonse Legros,” The Portfolio, January 1875, p. 115).

It was precisely this “sincere piety,” indebted to the Old Masters and revitalized by Legros, that drew the admiration of Baudelaire. This quality, the critic believed, along with the ability to transform the vulgar and the trivial into the moral and the grand, offered a promising path for Legros, and other artists who wished to create religious paintings for the modern age.[vii] In the figures’ unnatural flatness (they appear to be stuck to the background, like paper dolls in a tableau) and the perspectival aberrations of the room in which they prayed, Baudelaire found “charm,” intimacy, and a compelling look back to the childlike innocence of “old pictures.”[viii] At the same time, however, Legros’s care to render each and every detail, from imported cottons to an umbrella laid out as if in a shop window, and his brash, unforgiving figure-style (memorably described by one contemporary writer as “Pre-Raphaelite in its still intensity, with a dash of Courbet”),[ix] created a work as current as it was timeless.

Baudelaire’s defense of the idiosyncrasies in Legros’s painting, however eloquent and widely known, could not prevent the scandal that engulfed the picture four years later. In 1863, feeling defeated by a fickle Parisian art market, Legros arrived in London at the invitation of his good friend James Abbot McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and his brother-in-law, the artist Seymour Haden (1818-1910). Finding Legros “in so deplorable a condition that it needed God or a lesser person to pull him out of it,”[x] Whistler set the artist up in his studio and introduced him to several wealthy art collectors, including the Greek émigré Ionides family, who would become one of Legros’s most important patrons.[xi] Some months earlier, Haden himself had purchased Legros’s “Church Interior” (L’angelus). After making some “corrections” to the composition, Haden had it extravagantly reframed and hung in the drawing-room of his London house, in preparation for Legros’s arrival.

Whistler’s own account of what was to follow, outlined in a letter to his friend Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) on January 4, 1864, breathlessly describes the ensuing encounter between artist and painting:

. . . the first event to make the Colony of Chelsea tremble with indignation! was the discovery of the brother-in-law’s crime, so long hidden, and so long known to the two of us, you and me: the retouching of the Angelus!!!! You can see Legros’ anguish at his first sight of it! seeking out amongst the random rays of the setting sun, à la Turner, the calm grey flagstones of his beloved church!! – I shall leave you to imagine his twitches of rage! and my own little private glee at thinking of the just vengeance of the Gods which patiently tracks down the mart purchaser! The next day, after mickle excitement, we went back to Sloane Street, and we brought the Angelus back to Lindsey Row, and spent the day with spirit, benzene, knife and razor removed all the fine perspective corrections made by Haden! – Shortly after, Haden came back – and we wait for him to visit! Two days later along he comes – cheerful and attentive, and the two of us charming and gracious! a perfect reception! You see how skilful this was! feelings under check, as he felt in something of an odd position, he tells us merrily about his journey without appearing to notice the picture which was staring into the whites of his eyes all the time! – It was on the easel in all its state of demolition! as Legros had not wanted to repair it before he could see the damage! - At last he said to Alphonse as he was leaving “Ah, so you have taken it all off! well! do it better!” at which Alphonse calmly answers “Yes!” – . . .

Haden’s “retouching” of Legros’s painting adds yet another (and this time literal) layer of interest and significance to L’angelus, and provides a dramatic example of what makes this one of the nineteenth century’s most compelling works. This “simple, precious masterpiece,”[xiv] the first of Legros’s quiet, seemingly self-contained church interiors, with figures absorbed in their own thoughts and practices, is in fact a palimpsest of competing and profoundly referential art historical narratives. With its seamless union of past and present, and its ability to shift between the antiquated and the avant-garde, L’angelus expresses the faith not merely of the kneeling women within its frame, but of the time and place in which they – and the artist who painted them - lived.

The composition of L’angelus draws from other pictures and etchings in Legros’s oeuvre. It is similar to La Veillee Mortuaire (1859) with its tilting floor and flat figures, and the rigid horizontal format is also seen in Procession dans les Caveaux de St. Medard (1859). Legros likely worked from hired models and sketches of family members, many of whom were featured in later works: the woman standing above the rest in his famous Ex-Voto (1860, Dijon, Musée Des Beaux-Arts), for example, is the same figure as that on the right of L’angelus. According to the Academy, Legros also augmented the realism of this and other religious scenes by visiting a monastery in Paris, where he studied the monks “in all their household functions”: “He knew their particular physiognomy by heart, their gestures, the folds of their dresses . . .” (“M. Legros’ Etchings,” The Academy 10, July 22, 1876, p. 92).

This catalogue note was written by Emily M. Weeks, Ph.D.