Biographies

Louis Auguste Mathieu Legrand (1863 – 1951) Louis Legrand was born in Dijon, France on September 29, 1863. His desire to become an artist was such that he studied at the Dijon Ecole des Beaux Arts in his spare time and in the evenings while working as a bank teller. At the age of twenty he won the Devosge prize at that school and a year later left for Paris. Legrand arrived in Paris in 1884, where he studied under and soon became famous for his paintings, drawings and etchings depicting the beau-monde of his time. Ballet school scenes were also favourite subjects. He was a superb draughtsman and his etchings also show great sophistication. Legrand’s prints were almost all published by Gustave Pellet, who had a name for publishing mildly (though not always) erotic images and some of Legrand’s boudoir scenes were erotic enough. Legrand was very much the kind of artist that Baudelaire had described as a painter of modern life. Felicien Rops