Alphonse Legros (1837-1911)

Spielmann observed that 'Mr. Legros' name is great in art - in painting, sculpture, etching and teaching'. Legros found great success in Britain and like his fellow French émigré, Aimé Jules Dalou, infused the late Victorian art scene with characteristic joie de vivre, which together with technical expertise (particularly in the art of bronze casting) helped create the New Sculpture movement.
The fragmented form of Female Torso is unmistakeably indebted to antiquity, albeit parallel in chronology and style to Legros' friend Auguste Rodin's Eve au rocher. It's modernism is beyond New Sculpture: a prelude to Alexander Archipenko's Turning Torso or Wilhelm Lehmbruck's Torso eines jungen Weibes.
Bilbey illustrates a plaster version (52.5 cm.) high in the V&A, and records a slightly reduced bronze (46 cm. high) in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and a marble version exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1972.