The Confession
About the painting
Alphonse Legros (1837-1911) was born in Dijon where he entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts before attending the 'Petite Ecole' of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran (1802-1897) in Paris and then Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He started exhibited at the Salon in 1857. In 1863, Legros visited London where he found admirers and patrons, notably the Ionides family, and was ardently promoted by the brothers Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti. An etcher, a painter and a sculptor, he succeeded Edward John Poynter (1836-1919) at the Slade School in 1876 and was naturalized as a British citizen in 1880.
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This work is a fine example of Legros' religious paintings of the 1870s. It depicts a half-naked old man kneeling before a priest and perhaps receiving the host. Legros particularly favoured the religious thematic during the 1860s and appeared here indebted to 16th-century Venetian art he had studied in his youth in the Louvre.
Victoria and Albert Museum
Particulars
- Accession number
- CAI.30
