Here is the second installment of pictures from the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection. Today’s images feature the artwork of Auguste Legras (1817 – 1887) who was “born in Perigueux, France and was a pupil of Jean-Claude Bonneford (1796 – 1860) and Ary Scheffer (1795 – 1858). LeGras made his debut at the Paris Salon in 1847 and exhibited up to 1882. He was Ary Scheffer’s assistant for some twenty years. He worked mainly on portraits and copies of Old Masters” and apparently military uniform studies. The majority of these paintings were part of a large collection entitled Etudes de Types Militaires that was published in 1875. There are a total of 114 of Legras’ uniform prints on the Brown server–I’ve only downloaded the French ones. To see all of them go to this page.
The images, as downloaded, were somewhat dark and lacking the vibrant colors found in the French uniforms of the day. A quick fix in GIMP (adjusting the brightness a small bit and kicking up the contrast) was all that was needed to light up these beautiful pictures. Again, these images are very large, so I broke them down into four separate Mediafire downloads. I put twelve .jpeg’s into each zip file but that apparently didn’t do much to compress the overall size.
Here are the Mediafire links….(each is over 300MB so be patient).
Mon Legionnaire 
I haven’t seen the originals which you say are dark, but these are superb. You did a marvelous job on them. The colouring is beautiful. Eugene
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Thanks for the feedback Eugene. I want to get some of these printed off on some quality paper and have them framed. Hopefully the printing process does not darken the subject like it often does. My favorites are the Capitaine de Tirailleur, the Tambour (drummer), and of course the first three Foreign Legion pictures.
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I have 26 original LeGras prints from this folio, including two of the three featured above. Any advice regarding their value and how I to best market them would be appreciated.
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These are very nice uniform prints and you are lucky to have some of them. They are valuable but I would probably be way off the mark on what you could get for them. They are probably harder to find in North America than in Europe so depending on where you live this might be a factor. DelCampe is a French auction website and you might see if anyone is selling the same items. Age, rarity and condition is a factor as well as the original size with bigger being better. I did a quick Google scan and found one set of four framed Legras prints (probably from the same book) auctioned with an estimated price of AUD 120 – AUD 180 but the site does not say what they sold for. Personally, I think you could get over $100.00 for each if they were framed and a set of four about #300.00. That is where I would start if I had 26 prints–but then again I’d probably put them on my own wall.
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