Failure to Sketch: Alphonse Legros' "Time Studies" (1879–80)

In 1879–80, in a tour of British cities promoting the Slade School of Art, the French painter Alphonse Legros stood before an easel in an array of venues to execute his “time studies,” portraits served up in an hour. Legros had replaced the history painter Edward Poynter in 1876 as Slade Professor of Drawing. Local grandees were the models; Poynter was the tour organizer. The “time studies” were sketch-like in their rapid execution, but these canvases have not been referred to as ébauches and they do not exhibit the marks—agile, open-ended, self-revelatory—associated with what Deanna Petherbridge has called the “persistent cult of the sketch.” A typical time-study floats an often densely impastoed head against untouched priming. Walter Sickert seems to have judged the “time studies” using the criteria of the sketch. The “absence of relation between head and background” made the “time studies,” complained Sickert, “almost a model of how not” to paint a portrait. Sickert might have been mollified if Legros had followed his very own advice. Legros “taught us to draw freely,” recalled former Slade student William Rothenstein in 1894, “gradually coaxing the solid forms into being as if from a cloud by superimposed hatching.” Executed in Victorian Britain, Legros's time-studies were rooted in Second Empire France. My paper will show how portraits criticized as inert occupy an intriguing position between the possibilities of an evolving academic practice of drawing and the public display of spontaneity in painting that would soon be valued in modernism.