Луи Огюст Матьё Легран: Француз суретшісінің өмірі мен шығармалары

French artist

Louis Auguste Mathieu Legrand (29 September 1863 – 1951) was a French artist, known especially for his aquatint engravings, which were sometimes erotic. He was awarded the Légion d'honneur for his work in 1906.

Legrand was born in the city of Dijon in the east of France. He worked as a bank clerk before deciding to study art part time at Dijon's Ecole des Beaux Arts. He won the Devosge prize at the school in 1883. In 1884 Legrand studied engraving under the Belgian printmaker Félicien Rops. His black and white etchings especially provide a sense of decadence; they have been compared to those of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, though his drawings of the Moulin Rouge, the can can dance and the young women of Montmartre preceded Toulouse Lautrec's paintings of similar scenes. Two of his satirical artworks caused him to be tried for obscenity. The first, "Prostitution" was a symbolic drawing which depicted a naked girl being grasped by a dark monster which had the face of an old woman and claws on its hands; the second, "Naturalism", showed the French novelist Émile Zola minutely studying the thighs of a woman with a magnifying glass. Defended by his friend the lawyer Eugène Rodrigues Henriques (1853–1928), he was found not guilty in the lower court, but was convicted in the appeal court and then given a short prison sentence for refusing to pay his fine. Legrand died in obscurity in 1951. A retrospective exhibition was held at the Félicien Rops museum in Namur, Belgium in 2006 to celebrate his graphic art. The art collector Victor Arwas published a catalogue raisonné for the occasion. Titi. Brooklyn Museum.