Legros friendship with the sculptor Dalou went back to their student years together at the Petite Ecole. When Dalou arrived with his wife in London in 1870 in exile from France, Legros immediately came to their help. Legros introduced Dalou to George Howard, Earl of Carlisle, patron and friend of the Pre-Raphaelites and others, who bought his first statuette by Dalou in March 1872; later Legros introduced Dalou to Constantine Ionides and other patrons and was instrumental in getting a teaching post for Dalou at the South Kensington School of Art which he held until 1880 when, following the amnesty extended to political exiles, he returned to France.
The portrait of Dalou is similar in technique and composition to that of Edward Poynter (P374)- the choice of the two as models suggests that both the Poynter and Dalou portraits were made as part of Legros’s demonstrations of etching techniques at the South Kensington School of Art where both subjects were teachers.
The Dalou portrait was made in 1876 – an early proof of the plate was given to the British Museum in that year. Legros also worked on another portrait of Dalou abandoned in its early stages, and it is possible that he undertook the present version using the experiences gained from working on the portrait of Poynter. Indeed the two are very similar in composition. In the first proof of the Poynter plate, the drawing of the jacket was much more elaborate, though in the final state this was simply left as a triangle of blank white which acts as a focal point to the head. The Poynter portrait was also the first to use the background of horizontal hatched lines – a formula carried on even more successfully in the Dalou portrait where the hatched ground and the plain white area of the jacket throw the emphasis on the sculptural quality of the head.
