Head of a Man Looking Upwards and Sideways

Alphonse Legros was a French-born artist who settled in England in the 1860s and became one of the most influential figures in late Victorian British art, particularly through his teaching at the Slade School of Fine Art. His Head of a Man Looking Upwards and Sideways (1876) is characteristic of his sustained interest in the human head as a subject for careful, unsentimental study — an engagement that recalled the Spanish and Dutch masters he deeply admired. Legros's etchings and paintings of aged working-class heads brought a severity and directness to British art that was unconventional in its time.

Legros builds the head with precise, rather dry brushwork that emphasizes structure and the fall of light over sentiment or atmospheric softening. The upward gaze creates a foreshortened perspective that displays his confident draughtsmanship, with the form modeled in a restrained tonal range influenced by Spanish realism.