Pencil & white chalk drawing signed in the cup AL 1889.

Provenance London private collection. With its classically inspired
economy of form and design, Legros's interpretation of his realist
subject-matter exerted a decisive influence in England on the
representation of peasant life in the 1880s, comparable with that of
Jules Bastien-Lepage. He had a taste for the macabre, which endured from
 his illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe of 1861 to be absorbed into the
Symbolism of the 1890s (as in the series Triumph of Death, begun 1894).
In the etchings Death of the vagabond and Death and the wood-cutter,
these themes coalesce in a stark blend of realism and fantasy which is
simultaneously elevated and humane.