Kathleen Irene Ashburnham Kelly Newton (1854 – 1882) first appeared in James Tissot’s paintings in 1876.  Who was she?  All we have to know her by are a few biographical facts researched by Tissot scholar Willard E. Misfeldt (b. 1930) and others, and dozens of paintings of Kathleen Newton by James Tissot.

According to Dr. Misfeldt, Kathleen Irene Kelly was born in May or June of 1854 in Agra, India.  Her mother, Flora W. Boyd, passed away, and she and her brother, Frederick, and elder sister, Mary Pauline (“Polly,” 1851/52 – 1896), were the responsibility of their father, Charles Frederick Kelly (1810 – 1885).  Mr. Kelly had been employed at the accountant’s office of the British East India Company in Agra from age 21 or 22 until his retirement to Conisbrough, South Yorkshire, in 1866.  At some point around mid-1860, the family began to use Ashburnham as a middle name.  Kathleen and Mary Pauline were sent back to England to be educated at Gumley House Convent School, Isleworth.  When Kathleen was sixteen, a marriage was arranged for her, and she returned to India to marry Dr. Isaac Newton, a surgeon in the Indian civil service.

Dr. Misfeldt skirts the issue of what happened next, but after the wedding on January 3, 1871, the young bride is said to have followed the advice of the local priest and confessed to her new husband that while travelling on the ship to India, she had been involved with a Captain Palliser.  She was sent back to England, gave birth to a daughter, Muriel Violet Mary Newton, in Conisbrough on December 20, and was officially divorced (decree nisi) by December 30.  At some point, she moved in with her sister Polly, by then married and living with her two young daughters, Belle and Lilian, at 6 Hill Road, St. John’s Wood, London.  There Kathleen gave birth to a son, Cecil George Newton, on March 21, 1876.  (It is said that Polly’s husband, Mr. Hervey, was in the Indian civil service.)

James Tissot had left Paris following the bloody Commune in 1871, and by early 1873, he had bought the lease on a medium-sized, two-storey Queen Anne-style villa, built of red brick with white Portland stone dressing, at 17 (now 44), Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood.

The residents of the comfortable suburban homes around the Regent’s Park and the district of St. John’s Wood, west of the park, were merchants, bankers and lawyers.  Tissot’s house was set in a large and private garden separating him from the horse traffic, omnibuses and pedestrians on their way to the park or the still-new Underground Railway station nearby.  Kathleen lived just around the corner, and legend has it that she met Tissot while mailing a letter at a postbox.

On the Thames (1876), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 28.5 by 46.5 in. (72.5 by 118 cm). Hepworth Wakefield Art Gallery, Wakefield, UK. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot” by Lucy Paquette, © 2012.

In my previous blog post, James Tissot’s Models à la Mode, I indicated that the shadowy face in the center of The Thames (1876), was likely Tissot’s first painting featuring Kathleen Newton, and that she seems to be the model for one of the figures in Portsmouth Dockyard (c. 1877) as well.

Kathleen modeled for dozens of Tissot’s paintings; soon, he was painting her almost exclusively.  These pictures form a charming chronicle of their years together.  They also portray her rapid evolution from a young beauty travelling with her artist-lover, to a busy, beloved mother, then to a woman struggling with tuberculosis.

In Room Overlooking the Harbor (c. 1876-78) Kathleen is on holiday with Tissot.  He captured her going about her business while an older man (who could be a servant accompanying the couple) gamely models as well.

Mavourneen (Portrait of Kathleen Newton, 1877). Oil on canvas, 36 in. /91.44 cm. by 20 in./50.80 cm. Photo courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot,” © 2012 by Lucy Paquette

In 1877, Tissot captured Kathleen’s youthful, glowingly healthy beauty in Mavourneen.

In By the Thames at Richmond (c. 1878), a scene based on a photograph that surely was staged, a man (modeled by Tissot or perhaps Kathleen’s brother, Frederick Kelly) is writing “I love you” on the ground while Kathleen reacts with a smile.  The girl is likely Kathleen’s daughter, Muriel Violet, who would have been about seven years old at this time.

Study for “Mrs. Newton with a Child by a Pool” (c. 1877-78). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA.

In Mrs. Newton with a Child by a Pool (c. 1877-78), Kathleen plays with her son, Cecil, by the ornamental pool in the garden of Tissot’s house in St. John’s Wood.

Kathleen is a lovely 24-year-old in A Winter’s Walk (Promenade dans la neige , c. 1878).

She is still fresh-faced at 25 in Mrs. Newton with an Umbrella (c. 1879, Musée Baron Martin, Gray, France).

At the Louvre (c. 1879-80), by James Tissot.  Private Collection.  (Photo:  Wikiart.org)

In 1879, the couple traveled to Paris, where Tissot used the Louvre as a setting for several paintings featuring Kathleen in her caped greatcoat.

Waiting for the Ferry (c. 1878), by James Tissot.

Kathleen Newton with James Tissot in his garden at Grove End Road.  The children are Muriel Violet Newton and Cecil Newton.  Photo c. 1878.  (Wikimedia.org)

Between about 1878 and 1881, Tissot produced a number of paintings featuring Kathleen as a traveler.  [See The Art of Waiting, by James Tissot, Tissot and Degas visit the Louvre, 1879 and Victorians on the Move, by James Tissot.]  Tissot had painted Kathleen Newton so often in the half-dozen years they spent together that her face became stylized.

The Dreamer (or, Summer Evening, c. 1882), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

In the final two years of Kathleen’s life, Tissot captured her looking tired and pale, with dark shadows under her eyes, or bedridden.  [See James Tissot’s garden idyll & Kathleen Newton’s death.]  The Victorian Web features a study of Mrs. Newton asleep in a conservatory chair, courtesy of Peter Nahum Ltd, London, dated 1881-82, and the Musée Baron Martin in Gray, France has a painting from the same time period, Mrs. Newton Resting on a Chaise-longue, in which she is propped up on two pillows and looks very ill.

Kathleen Newton died of tuberculosis on November 9, 1882, at age 28, at Tissot’s house with her sister, Polly Hervey, at her side (according to the death register).  Tissot draped the coffin in purple velvet and prayed beside it for hours.

In the six years that Kathleen Newton lived with James Tissot and modeled for him, he painted few other female models besides the girl in Croquet (c. 1878).  He produced only about two major portraits during the years Kathleen lived with him, Algernon Moses Marsden (1877), and Portrait of Mrs Catherine Smith Gill and Two of her Children (1877, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.)

Immediately after the funeral on November 14, at the Church of Our Lady in Lisson Grove, St. John’s Wood, Tissot returned to Paris.  There, he exerted himself to re-establish his reputation in Paris with a series of fifteen large-scale pictures called La Femme à Paris (The Parisian Woman).  Painted between 1883 and 1885, they portrayed the fashionable parisienne in various incarnations.  Exhibited at the Galerie Sedelmeyer, from April 19 to June 15, 1885, as “Quinze Tableaux sur la Femme à Paris,” the pictures were poorly received.  A critic for La Vie Parisienne complained that the women in the series were “always the same Englishwoman” – some say the faces all resemble Kathleen Newton.  [See Tissot’s La Femme à Paris series.]

Tissot’s relationship with Kathleen Newton was evidently the only successful romance of his life.  [See Tissot’s Romances.]

The Apparition (1885), by James Tissot.  (Wikipaintings.org)

He tried to contact her through a series of séances.  On May 20, 1885, at a séance in London, Tissot recognized the female of two spirits who appeared as Kathleen, and he asked her to kiss him.  The spirit is said to have done so, several times, with “lips of fire.”  Then she shook hands with Tissot and disappeared.  He made this image of the vision to commemorate their reunion.

After his death in 1902, James Tissot and his work, and Kathleen Newton, were largely forgotten.

By 1930, few, if any, of Tissot’s contemporaries remained to share recollections of the artist.  The only biographical material on Tissot publicly available was a twenty-five page journal article published in France in 1906.

Kathleen’s daughter, Muriel Violet, died in 1933, and Mrs. Newton’s identity was forgotten – except by her son, Cecil.  In 1933, the first exhibition of Tissot’s work was held at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1933: ” ‘In the Seventies’ – An Exhibition of Paintings by James Tissot.”  A visitor to this exhibition, a man in his late fifties, stood before one of the paintings of a beautiful woman and declared, “That was my mother,” then walked out.  The woman, who appeared in a number of Tissot’s paintings between 1876 and 1882, and whose identity remained unknown into the next decade, was referred to as “la Mystérieuse” – the Mystery Woman.

The first biography was published in London in 1936:  Vulgar Society: The Romantic Career of James Tissot, 1836-1902, by novelist and fashion historian James Laver (1899 –1975).  Laver may have taken some poetic license when he wrote that Tissot kept his mistress hidden away in his home in St. John’s Wood and that “she led almost the life of a prisoner,” “as if she had been a beauty of the harem.”

In 1946, a London journalist, Marita Ross, published a plea for information regarding “La Mystérieuse,” Tissot’s unidentified mistress.  But Lilian Hervey, then 71, replied that this was her aunt, Kathleen Irene Ashburnham Kelly Newton (1854 – 1882), and she had original photographs of Mrs. Newton with James Tissot.  [See James Tissot in the 1940s: La Mystérieuse is identified.]

By the late 1960s, Willard Misfeldt was researching James Tissot and Kathleen Newton.

In 2014, I visited James Tissot’s one-time home in St. John’s Wood and Kathleen Newton’s grave.  [See  A visit to James Tissot’s house & Kathleen Newton’s grave.]

I was able to make arrangements for a private tour of Tissot’s home thanks to the kindness of Irish author Patricia O’Reilly.  Patricia imagined Kathleen Newton’s life in A Type of Beauty: The Story of Kathleen Newton (1854-1882), © 2010.  Click here to read it – and click here to read how I’ve imagined Kathleen’s life in The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot ), © 2012!

Related posts:

James Tissot’s house at St. John’s Wood, London

James Tissot Domesticated

Was Cecil Newton James Tissot’s son?

James Tissot’s garden idyll & Kathleen Newton’s death

Kathleen Newton by James Tissot: eight auctioned oil paintings

©  2017 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).    See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

We know so little of James Tissot (1836 – 1902) outside of his work; his personal papers were destroyed, and he had no disciples to carry on and burnish his reputation.

But there are several photographs of him, and his self-portraits.

This photograph, made by Robert Jefferson Bingham (1825 – 1870), was made shortly after Tissot arrived in Paris, in 1855 at age 19.

Bingham, an English photographer, showed nineteen photographs at The Great Exhibition of 1851, and also made photographs of the Exposition Universelle of 1855 in Paris.  In 1857, Bingham moved to Paris and opened an atelier in the artistic quarter of Nouvelle Athènes.  So it is likely that Tissot was 20 or 21 in this photo, a dapper and ambitious young art student from the provinces quickly establishing himself in the competitive art world of the capital.  He appears considerably more sophisticated than he presents himself in a self-portrait as a monk a few years later, c. 1859.

A photograph of James Tissot was made about 1865 by Étienne Carjat (1828 –1906), a French journalist, caricaturist and photographer who co-founded the magazine Le Diogène and founded the review Le Boulevard.  But Carjat is best known for his numerous portraits and caricatures of Parisian political, literary and artistic figures.  In 1860, he opened a photography studio at 56 rue Laffitte, which he operated for 20 years.  Carjat received a medal for his photographs in the Salon of 1863.  While he did not achieve the fame of Nadar, he did capture the personalities of his sitters, who included Gioacchino Rossini, Alexandre Dumas (père), Emile Zola, Charles Baudelaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Gustave Courbet and Victor Hugo.  Carjat was a friend of Henri Fantin-Latour, and it was probably through him that he met James McNeill Whistler in Paris in April 1863.  Around 1865, Carjat made two cartes-de-visite photographs of Whistler, who had been friends with Tissot since about 1857.

In Carjat’s photograph, Tissot is about 29 years old.  He was earning 70,000 francs a year as an easel painter, and he produced another self-portrait at this time.

Self portrait (1865), by James Tissot, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA, USA. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, by Lucy Paquette © 2012

At the Paris Salon in 1866, Tissot was elected hors concours: from then on, he could exhibit any painting he wished at the annual Salon without first submitting his work to the jury’s scrutiny. The price for his pictures skyrocketed. At 30, he decided to purchase property on the most prestigious new thoroughfare in Paris, the avenue de l’Impèratrice (Empress Avenue, now avenue Foch). By late 1867 or early 1868, Tissot was living in grand style in his luxurious new villa.

In 1867-68, Tissot’s friend Edgar Degas painted him, and this detail from a carte-de-visite photograph reflects his appearance at the time.  Tissot was described as having “a shock of jet-black hair, a drooping Mongolian mustache, an excellent tailor, and a small private fortune.”

Portrait of James Jacques Joseph Tissot (c. 1867-68), by Edgar Degas.  Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  Rogers Fund, 1939.  (Photo:  Open Access).

After winning the right – at age 30 – to exhibit anything he wished at the Salons, and busy with commissions from his aristocratic patrons, Tissot did not need to kowtow to the critics.  He began painting light-hearted, sexually suggestive pictures, which would have been shocking in a contemporary context. He safely set them in the years of the French Directory (1795 to 1799), as if they depicted behaviors of a bygone time. One critic at the time observed that Tissot was dapper and personable, but thought him a little pretentious and a less-than-great artist “because he did what he wanted to do and as he wished to do it.” Tissot, having made his own way to the top of his profession, probably was a little smug in his success.

Study for James Jacques Joseph Tissot (c. 1867-68), by Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas.  Prepared chalk on tan wove paper. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Cesar M. de Hauke.  (Photo:  Open Access)

When the Second Empire collapsed on September 2, 1870, Tissot’s charmed life in Paris ended.  He became a sharpshooter, defending Paris in an elite unit, the Éclaireurs (Scouts) of the Seine.  [See James Tissot and The Artists’ Brigade, 1870-71.]  In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War – the bloody Commune in mid-1871 – James Tissot fled Paris with 100 francs to his name, establishing himself in the competitive London art market by catering to the British taste.  By 1873, he bought the lease on a spacious villa in St. John’s Wood, soon building an extension with a studio and huge conservatory.

He declined Degas’s exhortation to show his work in Paris with the independent group of French artists who organized their first of eight exhibitions in Paris in 1874 and who soon became known as Impressionists.  But Tissot and Edouard Manet travelled to Venice together in the fall of 1874, and Tissot bought Manet’s Blue Venice on March 24, 1875 for 2,500 francs.  Manet badly needed the income.  Tissot hung the painting in his home in St. John’s Wood, London, and tried to interest English dealers in Manet’s work.  [For more on how Tissot tried to help his friends, see James Tissot the Collector:  His works by Degas, Manet & Pissarro.]

A few of his contemporaries described him at this time.  Berthe Morisot, in an 1875 letter to her sister, Edma Pontillon, wrote, “We went to see Tissot, who does very pretty things that he sells at high prices; he is living like a king.  We dined there.  He is very nice, a very good fellow, though a little vulgar.  We are on the best of terms; I paid him many compliments, and he really deserves them.”  During the same trip, Morisot wrote to her mother, “[Tissot] is turning out excellent pictures.  He sells for as much as 300,000 francs at a time.  What do you think of his success in London?   He was very amiable, and complimented me although he has probably never seen any of my work.”

Francis, Duke of Teck (1837 – 1900)

The same year, painter Giuseppe De Nittis wrote to his wife, Léontine, “I saw Tissot at the club, he was very nice, very friendly.”

Alan S. Cole wrote in his diary, on November 16, 1875, “Dined with Jimmy [Whistler]: Tissot, A[lbert] Moore and Captain Crabb.  Lovely blue and white china – and capital small dinner. General conversation and ideas on art unfettered by principles.”

British painter Louise Jopling (1843 – 1933) wrote, “James Tissot was a charming man, very handsome, extraordinarily like the Duke [then, Prince] of Teck.  He was always well groomed, and had nothing of artistic carelessness either in his dress or demeanor…he was very hospitable, and delightful were the dinners he gave.”

By 1876, James Tissot again had earned great wealth and lived in relative seclusion for six years with his mistress and muse, young divorcée Kathleen Irene Ashburnham Kelly Newton (1854 – 1882).  [See James Tissot Domesticated and James Tissot’s Model and Muse, Kathleen Newton.]  In this photograph, Tissot is in his forties, painting in his studio.  French writer and critic Edmond de Goncourt (1822 – 1896) described him as having “a large, unintelligent skull and the eyes of a boiled fish.”  It was in late 1874 that Goncourt wrote in his journal, “Tissot, that plagiarist painter, has had the greatest success in England.  Was it not his idea, this ingenious exploiter of English idiocy, to have a studio with a waiting room, where, at all times, there is iced champagne at the disposal of visitors, and around the studio, a garden where, all day long, one can see a footman in silk stockings brushing and shining the shrubbery leaves?”  Nevertheless, Goncourt relied on Tissot to illustrate Renée Mauperin, a novel written with his brother Jules (published in 1884).  Kathleen Newton modeled for the heroine.

In the photograph below, Tissot poses for Waiting for the Ferry (c. 1878) in his garden at Grove End Road with Kathleen Newton and her children, Muriel Violet Newton and Cecil Newton.

Kathleen Newton died of tuberculosis at Tissot’s St. John’s Wood home in November, 1882, and he immediately moved back to his Paris villa.  He tried, and failed, to recapture his early success before embarking on an ambitious new project.  In 1885-86, he made his first trip to Palestine to research his illustrated Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  In the above photograph, c. 1890, Tissot was in his mid-fifties.  His self-portrait in watercolor, below, was painted around the same time.

Portrait of the Pilgrim (1886-1896), by James Tissot.  Self-portrait in watercolor and graphite.  Brooklyn Museum, New York.

In 1896, Tissot exhibited his complete Life of Christ series in London.  His La Vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ was published in France, with the artist receiving a million francs for reproduction rights.

He embarked on his third trip to Palestine to begin an illustrated Old Testament (which would be published in 1904, two years after his death).  On the ship, English artist George Percy Jacomb-Hood (1857-1929) encountered Tissot and found him “a very neatly dressed, elegant figure, with a grey military moustache and beard, [who] always appeared on deck gloved and groomed as if for the boulevard.”

James Tissot’s father died in 1888, leaving him the Château de Buillon, near Besançon in eastern France.  During his remaining years, he lived partly in Paris and partly at the Château, improving the building and grounds.  The photograph above was made of Tissot around 1898.  He must have been experimenting with poses for his self-portrait of that year (below, right).

James Tissot died in 1902, at age 66, extremely wealthy and renowned for what was considered his great masterpiece, The Life of Christ illustrations. In his obituary in The Evening Post, Tissot was compared to William Blake, though “uniting as Blake never did, and as no other prominent artist has done, the mystical and ideal with an intense realism.”

An early biographer who knew him briefly, Georges Bastard (1881 – 1939), wrote that Tissot “was as reserved as the cut of his coat.”  No bon mots have been recorded, nor anecdotes by contemporaries who may have encountered Tissot at Second Empire receptions or balls – just a bit of jealous carping about his success.  While certainly not a reticent man, James Tissot could not have been a gregarious one.  He was determined to succeed on his own terms, and he did.  His work continues to fascinate us, and it alone must speak for him.

Related posts:

A James Tissot Chronology, by Lucy Paquette for The Victorian Web

James Tissot (1836-1902): a brief biography by Lucy Paquette for The Victorian Web

James Tissot the Collector:  His works by Degas, Manet & Pissarro

Was James Tissot a Plagiarist?

Tissot’s Romances

©  2017 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).    See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

If a person can be known by the company he keeps, James Tissot’s friends indicate he was charming, broad-minded and cultured, interested in music and literature as well as art, resourceful, and unafraid of change.  Described as reserved, he had a strong work ethic and spent a great deal of time working in his studio.  But he seems to have made friends easily and maintained numerous mutually satisfying relationships over many years – with both men and women, of varied ages, religions, backgrounds, and temperaments.

James Tissot, age 20-21

Jacques Joseph Tissot’s first friend may have been his mother.  When he realized that what he really wanted was a career in art instead of architecture, his businessman father was less than thrilled.  His father told him that if he was determined to pursue this unreliable profession, he was going to have to make it on his own – with no financial help.  But his mother found a connection for him in Paris, and Jacques left home at 19, in 1856 (i.e before he turned 20 that October).

Within three years of his arrival in Paris, Tissot was ready to exhibit his work at the Salon.  Competing with established artists, the 23-year-old student submitted five entries for the Salon of 1859.  The jury accepted them all, including Portrait de Mme T…, a small oil painting of his mother.  With her belief in him, his career in the capital of the European art world was launched.

James Whistler

When Jacques Joseph Tissot exhibited in the Salon, it was as James Tissot – and it’s likely he borrowed the name from another young art student, James Whistler.

It is thought that when Tissot registered for permission to copy paintings at the Louvre on January 26, 1857, he met the pugnacious American James McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903), reportedly while copying Ingres’ 1819 Ruggiero Freeing Angelica side by side in the Luxembourg Museum.

Self-Portrait with White Collar (c. 1857), by Edgar Degas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Photo by Lucy Paquette)

In 1859, Tissot met another art student, with whom he became close friends – Edgar Degas (1834 – 1917).  Degas, the curmudgeonly son of a prosperous banker from Naples and a mother from New Orleans, had spent the previous three years traveling in central Italy.  Probably through Degas, Tissot soon met the charismatic, restless Édouard Manet (1832–1883).

Lawrence Alma-Tadema

In 1859, Tissot traveled to Antwerp, augmenting his art education by taking lessons in the studio of Belgian painter Hendrik Leys.  There he made friends with a young Dutch art student working with Leys, Lourens Tadema (1836 – 1912; the painter moved to London in 1870 and restyled himself Lawrence Alma-Tadema).

Alma-Tadema’s personality combined middle-class sensibilities with a ribald sense of humor.  He was an extrovert who loved wine, women, music, and practical jokes.

Édouard Manet

Emmanuel Chabrier, by Édouard Manet

Though still living in the dilapidated Latin Quarter at 29, Tissot was enjoying increasing professional success and was described as a boulevardier – a man-about-town.  In addition to painters, his friends included the poet Camille-André Lemoyne (1822 – 1907), “a man of modesty and merit” who dedicated a published poem, “Baigneuse,” to Tissot in 1860, and composer, pianist and bon vivant Emmanuel Chabrier (1841 – 1894), whose portrait Tissot drew in 1861.  His circles often overlapped; Chabrier, for example, was friends with Degas and Manet as well.

John Everett Millais

In 1862, Tissot traveled to London, where the first exhibition of his work was at the International Exhibition.  He showed one of his début paintings from the Paris Salon of 1859, and he must have met Britain’s most popular painter, John Everett Millais (1829 – 1896).  Warm-hearted, boyish, and boundlessly self-confident, Millias had a wife and five children to provide for by this time.  He found a steady source of income drawing illustrations, for periodicals such as Once a Week and The Cornhill Magazine as well as Tennyson’s Poems (1857) and Anthony Trollope’s novel Framley Parsonage (1860).  James Tissot, at 26, having inherited his parents’ business sense, was exploring a new art market and making useful contacts.

Alphonse Daudet

In 1863, Tissot became close friends with Alphonse Daudet (1840 – 1897), a young writer who had published a volume of poetry (The Lovers) in 1858, and who rented the room below him in the rue Bonaparte.  Daudet, who was kind, hard-working, generous and sociable, was employed as a secretary to the Duc de Morny, the Emperor’s illegitimate half-brother who served as a powerful appointed minister.  He eventually became wealthy from his novels, in which he wrote about the poor and downtrodden with sympathy, and his friendship with Tissot was a lifelong one.

In 1864, the year Millais was elected a member of the Royal Academy, Tissot again exhibited work in London:  two pictures on display at the Society of British Artists, and a small oil painting at the Royal Academy Exhibition.  In France, Tissot associated, loosely, with a band of artistic rebels led by Manet – men who met at the Café de Bade to debate the purpose of art and express their frustration with the rigidity of the Paris art Establishment.  But Tissot was a traditionalist at heart.  He must have admired Millais – as a man, as a painter, and as a successful businessman.  In 1865, Tom Taylor’s Ballads and Songs of Brittany was published in London, illustrated by several artists including Millais and Tissot, who provided the Frontispiece and further widened his reputation in Great Britain.

Ernest Meissonier

Ferdinand Heilbuth

In 1866, the thirty-year-old artist bought land to build a villa on the most prestigious of Baron Haussmann’s grand new Parisian boulevards, the eleven-year-old avenue de l’Impératrice (now avenue Foch).  By the Salon of 1868, Tissot had occupied his newly built, elegant mansion in the splendid avenue, the place to see and be seen amid the heady delights of life in the imperial capital.  But an early biographer asserted that there were no parties or receptions in this home, as Tissot dreaded the noise; he hosted only quiet gatherings with intimates such as Degas, eminent painter and sculptor Ernest Meissonier (1815 –1891), and painter Ferdinand Heilbuth (1826 – 1889).

Alfred Stevens

Tissot and wildly successful Belgian painter Alfred Stevens (1823 –1906) moved in the same social circle, which included Manet, Degas, Frédéric Bazille, Berthe Morisot and Whistler as well as Alma-Tadema.  Stevens and his wife held regular receptions at their home on Wednesdays.  Tissot may have preferred quiet evenings with his friends in his new villa, but in early 1868, he scribbled a hurried message to Degas on the back of a used envelope when he found Degas away from his studio:  “I shall be at Stevens’ house tonight.”  He had dropped by to give Degas advice on finishing a problematic painting-in-progress, Interior (The Rape) before the Salon deadline.

Tissot appears to have been content to live well and maintain a fairly low profile in the art world he had conquered within a decade of his arrival as a provincial art student.  Oddly, there are almost no references to Tissot in letters, journals or accounts of his chatty friends and acquaintances during this time, even though his studio was a chic gathering place, and it is likely he visited crowded, gossipy weekly soirées such as those hosted by Madame Manet (Edouard’s formidable mother) on Tuesdays, the Stevenses on Wednesdays, and Madame Morisot (Berthe’s formidable mother) on Thursdays.

In 1869, Tissot began contributing political cartoons to the newest Society journal in London, Vanity Fair, founded by Thomas Gibson Bowles (1841 – 1922).  Tommy Bowles was the illegitimate son of Thomas Milner Gibson (1806 – 1884), a Liberal MP for Manchester and President of the Board of Trade from 1859 to 1866, and a servant, Susannah Bowles.  Tommy’s father (and even his father’s wife, Arethusa Susannah, a Society hostess who was the daughter of Sir Thomas Gery Cullum of Hardwick House, Suffolk, and their six children) acknowledged him.  Tissot, at 33, was famous in Paris.  Tommy, a handsome blue-eyed blonde, was five or six years younger and making a name for himself, even in France, with his controversial articles in London’s Morning Post.

It is strange, the life Tissot led – an exclusive address and titled patrons in Paris and yet close friends with the individualistic, struggling Edgar Degas (who ceased to exhibit in the Salon after this year, due to his discontent with it), the illegitimate and irreverent London publisher Tommy Bowles, and the renegade James Whistler, who was considered belligerent and uncouth by this time.

It seems that James Tissot was a peaceable, refined, and multifaceted gentleman, truly his own man – in a world about to implode.

The Franco-Prussian War united Tissot and Tommy Bowles, who raced to Paris as a war correspondent.  Because there were not enough French troops, a National Guard – a volunteer militia independent of the regular army – was forming to defend Paris.  On Friday, September 9, 1870, Tommy was surveying the scene of Garde Mobile squads drilling or wandering around along the avenue de l’Impératrice [near James Tissot’s sumptuous villa at No. 64], “when my hand was suddenly seized, and I found myself talking to one of my smartest Parisian friends [James Tissot] who had donned the blue uniform like everybody else.  He was delighted to see me.”  Tissot gamely promised that if there was a sortie, he would make sure that Tommy had the chance to see some action.  [Tissot scholar Willard E. Misfeldt learned that James Tissot actually had enlisted in the Garde Nationale de la Seine, the Fourth Company of the Eighteenth Battalion, in 1855 – as soon as he had arrived in Paris at age 19.]

In early October, military operations blocked access to Tissot’s new villa, and he turned up at Bowles’ rented apartments.  Tommy observed affectionately of his friend, “We neither of us have got any money left, but we propose to support each other by our mutual credit…and to share our last rat together.  Meantime we are not greatly to be pitied.  Our joint domestic, Jean, one of those handy creatures yet to be invented in England, makes our beds, scrubs the floor, brushes the clothes, cooks like a cordon bleu, and is, as we believe and fervently hope, capable of producing any explanation or invention that may be required by persons in search of payment.  He has been especially successful as regards meat.”  The British journalist and the French painter shared a mischievous sense of humor, numerous dangerous sorties – and strong survival instincts.

The Tirailleurs de la Seine at the Battle of Rueil-Malmaison, 21st October 1870 (1875), by Étienne-Prosper Berne-Bellecour. (Oil on canvas, 103×203 cm; Château de Versailles, France; Giraudon). Photo courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot,” by Lucy Paquette © 2012

On October 21, 1870, the men in Tissot’s unit – the Éclaireurs of the Seine, an elite unit of scouts and snipers (tirailleurs) – “one and all Parisians of the purest type” according to Tommy Bowles – were sent to fight in the Battle of Malmaison (also referred to as the Battle of Rueil-Malmaison, or La Jonchère, for the nearby towns), west of Paris.  [See James Tissot and The Artists’ Brigade, 1870-71.]

During the war, James Tissot fought with valor on the front line, and he later volunteered as a Red Cross stretcher-bearer.  Then he became involved in the bloody civil uprising that followed, the Paris Commune.  He fled to London with a hundred francs in his pocket.  There, he had plenty of friends to help him rebuild his life.

Chichester Fortescue

Besides Tommy Bowles, there was Frances, Countess Waldegrave (1821 – 1879), an influential Liberal Society hostess whose fourth and final husband was Chichester Fortescue (1823 – 1898), an Irish MP, who became Lord Carlingford.  Tissot may have met her through Millais, who frequented her salons.  She shared Tissot’s interest in spiritualism and painting, and at some point, Tissot painted her portrait in her boudoir.  (The portrait, whereabouts unknown, was not considered a good likeness.)

In 1871 – shortly after Tissot fled Paris – the charming and “irresistible” Countess Waldegrave pulled strings to get Tissot a lucrative commission to paint a full-length portrait of Fortescue, which was funded by a group of eighty-one Irishmen including forty-nine MPs, five Roman Catholic bishops and twenty-seven peers to commemorate his term as Chief Secretary for Ireland under Gladstone – as a present to his wife.

Ouida

Tissot also was friendly with Society novelist Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé, 1839 – 1908); on June 19, 1871, she sent him an invitation to visit on June 21, with the promise that “some English artists will enjoy the great pleasure of meeting you & seeing your sketches.”  Described as having a “sinister, clever face” and a “voice like a carving knife,” Ouida lived in the Langham Hotel, where surrounded by purple flowers, she wrote on large sheets of violet-colored notepaper in bed by candlelight.  Her lavish soirées included celebrities such as Oscar Wilde, J.E. Millais. Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Wilkie Collins, along with dozens of handsome guard officers.

The Captain and the Mate, (1873), by James Tissot. The Captain and the Mate (1873), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 53.6 by 76.2 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot,” © 2012 Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, © 2012

Once Tissot moved to London in 1871, he continually sought “British” subject matter, always offering it up with a French twist.  He soon found a friend in Captain John Freebody (1834 – 1899), master of the Arundel Castle from 1872-73, when he took emigrants to America.  Captain Freebody’s wife, Margaret Kennedy (1840 – 1930), modeled for The Captain’s Daughter, set at the Falcon Tavern in Gravesend.  Tissot exhibited The Captain’s Daughter, as well as two other paintings [The Last Evening (1873) and Too Early (1873)], at the Royal Academy in 1873.

Two other paintings featuring Margaret Kennedy are in a private collection:  Boarding the Yacht (1873) and The Captain and the Mate (1873), in which Margaret’s older brother, red-bearded Captain Lumley Kennedy (1819 – 1899), and her sister posed as well.   Tissot, having grown up in the bustling seaport of Nantes, where his father was a successful wholesale linen draper (a trader in fabrics and dress trimmings to retailers and exporters), must have felt quite comfortable with sailors and their families.

Within a few years of hard work and help from such friends, Tissot bought the leasehold to a house in St. John’s Wood, at 17 (now 44) Grove End Road, and built an extension with a studio and a conservatory.  A handsome and talented 35-year-old Parisian, he earned and returned the respect of intelligent and capable women.

Louise Jopling

British painter Louise Jopling (1843 – 1933) lived in Paris from 1865 to 1869, when her ne’er-do-well husband, Frank Romer, was sent packing by his employer, Baron de Rothschild.  Louise had been painting with the encouragement of the Baroness, a watercolor artist, and after moving to London, Louise continued painting despite numerous hardships.  Her work was exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibitions after 1870, and she met “that extraordinarily clever French artist, James Tissot,” when his
picture, Too Early, “made a great sensation” at the 1873 exhibition.  Tissot gave her a sketch of Gravesend he made that year.  In her 1925 autobiography, Louise wrote of him, “James Tissot was a charming man, very handsome.”

Louise proved to be an excellent source of information on Tissot’s personality, including this anecdote about a day they spent with Ferdinand Heilbuth.  She wrote, “Heilbuth was a delightful man as well as an excellent painter.  He was a great friend of Tissot…One day, before I was married, he arrived at my studio and said he had a letter from Tissot, who begged him to come round to me and try to induce [my sister] Alice and I to come spend the day at Greenwich where he was painting his charming pictures of scenes by the Thames.  I was to bring my sketching materials.  I had promised [my fiancé] Joe to give him a sitting for my portrait, but it was much too delightful a project not to be accepted with fervor.  I wired to Joe, “Called out of town on business.”

Berthe Morisot, by Édouard Manet

Berthe Morisot (1841 – 1895) also appreciated Tissot.   He socialized frequently in 1875, inviting Berthe Morisot to dinner at his home in St. John’s Wood when she was in England for her honeymoon.  She wrote to her sister, Edma Pontillon, “We went to see Tissot, who does very pretty things that he sells at high prices; he is living like a king.  We dined there.  He is very nice, a very good fellow, though a little vulgar.  We are on the best of terms; I paid him many compliments, and he really deserves them.”

During the same trip, Berthe wrote to her mother, “[I was dragged out of bed] just now by a letter from Tissot – an invitation to dinner for tomorrow night.  I had to get up and ransack everything to find a clean sheet of paper in order to reply.”  Later, she added, “He was very amiable, and complimented me although he has probably never seen any of my work.”

In 1873, Tissot joined the Arts Club in Hanover Square, and in 1875, Italian painter Giuseppe De Nittis (1846 –1884) wrote to his wife, Léontine, “I saw Tissot at the club, he was very nice, very friendly.”

In 1874, Degas invited both Tissot and De Nittis to display their work in the first exhibition by the French artists who would become known as the Impressionists.  Tissot was achieving success in London and declined, but De Nittis accepted.

Sir Julius Benedict

Self-Portrait, Giuseppe Di Nittis

Another member of the Arts Club with whom Tissot was friendly was Sir Julius Benedict (1804 – 1885), the German-born composer and conductor who is portrayed as the pianist in Tissot’s Hush! (The Concert, 1875).  The son of a Jewish banker, Benedict became a naturalised Englishman and was knighted in 1871.

After spending several weeks in Venice with Manet, Tissot dined at his friend Jimmy Whistler’s three-storey townhouse in Lindsey Row, Chelsea on November 16, 1875 with Alan S. Cole (1846 – 1934, a lace and textile expert who was the son of Sir Henry Cole, the first director of the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A), independent-minded, outspoken painter Albert Moore (1841 – 1893) and Captain Crabb (commander of The Brazilian in 1870) on topics such as “ideas on art unfettered by principles.”

George Adolphus Storey

On December 7, Tissot returned to dine with Jimmy, his patron Cyril Flower (1843 – 1907, later Lord Battersea), and painter George Adolphus Storey (1834 – 1919); they conversed on the works of Balzac.

Storey, in his 1899 memoirs, described a high-spirited “railway picnic party” in 1873 with men he referred to as intellectuals:  Tissot, Heilbuth, Philip Hermogenes Calderon, R.A. (1833 – 1898), George Dunlop Leslie, A.R.A. (1835 – 1921), David Wilkie Wynfield (1837–1887), William Yeames, A.R.A. (1835 – 1918), Frederick Walker (1840 – 1875), editor Shirley Brooks (1816 – 1874) and “the Punch men,” pianist, conductor and composer Frederic Hymen Cowen (1852 – 1935), and a host of others returning from a grand house party in Manchester hosted by art dealer William Agnew (1825 – 1910).  Opera star Charles Santley (1834 – 1922), Storey added, “sang us many of his delightful songs.”

Mavourneen (Portrait of Kathleen Newton, 1877). Oil on canvas, 36 in. /91.44 cm. by 20 in./50.80 cm. Photo courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot,” © 2012 by Lucy Paquette

As desirable he was as a guest, Tissot must have enjoyed entertaining in his turn.  Louise Jopling noted of Tissot, “At one time he was very hospitable, and delightful were the dinners he gave.  But these ceased when he became absorbed in a grande passion with a married woman.”

Around 1876, Tissot met Kathleen Newton (1854 – 1882), an Irish divorcée in her early twenties with a four-year-old daughter and a son born on March 21, 1876.  [See James Tissot’s Model and Muse, Kathleen Newton and Was Cecil Newton James Tissot’s son?]  Being Roman Catholic, Tissot and Kathleen could not marry, but she moved into his house in St. John’s Wood.

Sir Charles Wyndham

Sir Henry Irving

Kathleen’s two children lived with her sister’s family around the corner, and they and their cousins visited Kathleen and Tissot regularly.  Tissot’s social life drastically changed, and he must have judged his love affair with the discarded young beauty well worth the sacrifice.  Though cohabitation was common in Victorian England, especially in bohemian circles, it was not socially acceptable to most people in the middle and upper classes.

Though Tissot and Mrs. Newton were not invited out, their friendship was valued, and plenty of lively friends sought their company.  One of Kathleen’s nieces, interviewed as an adult, recalled, “Whistler and Oscar Wilde, with his brother Willie, were constant visitors,” as were actor Henry Irving (1838 – 1905), actor-manager Charles Wyndham (1837 – 1919), and actress Miss Mary Moore (1860 – 1931, who became Wyndham’s second wife in 1916, the year he was widowed).  Tommy Bowles, his longtime friend, remained a frequent visitor and introduced others including landscape painter William Stone (c. 1840 – 1913), who “often had tea in the garden with Tissot and the lady.”  Stone, perhaps revealing the essence of Tissot’s charm, observed, “Tissot was quite a boulevardier and could not grasp our somewhat puritanical outlook.”

© 2017 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

Related posts:

On his own: Tissot as a Paris art student, 1855 — 1858

James Tissot & Tommy Bowles Brave the Siege Together: October 1870

James Tissot and The Artists’ Brigade, 1870-71

James Tissot the Collector:  His works by Degas, Manet & Pissarro

James Tissot and Alfred Stevens

James Tissot: Portraits of the Artist

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).    See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

James Tissot fled the violence and chaos of the Paris Commune in June, 1871, after prospering under Napoléon III’s Second Empire and then fighting for his country in the Franco-Prussian War, to live and prosper in London during Queen Victoria’s reign until he returned to France in November, 1882.

A newspaper weather map from September 25, 2017 that I used to mark our progress.

I’ve just returned from my long-planned Victorian Tour of the U.K. with my husband and gained more understanding of the Victorian England that Tissot experienced.  I studied Art History in London for a year when I was in my twenties, and since I married, my husband and I have traveled in the U.K. together three times, exploring London, Bath, Cambridge, Ely, Bury St. Edmunds, and Laycock.  On this trip, we were focusing on the Victorian experience, but without doubt, we missed a great deal in two weeks, and I’d like to hear from those of you familiar with other not-to-be-missed Victorian sights.  Relying on trains, we traveled from Manchester to Liverpool, York, Nottingham, Birmingham, and London, for the most part staying in Victorian-era hotels, dining in Victorian pubs, and visiting Victorian art collections and points of architectural interest.  These are some of my photos – and some by my husband, who really is the best traveling companion I could ever wish for.

Manchester Town Hall, with the Albert Memorial in the left foreground.

We started in Manchester, a handsome, exciting city combining the grandeur of its Victorian architecture with the sophistication of its modern energy.  Manchester, or “Cottonopolis,” was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and it became a city in 1853.  We saw a demonstration of original 19th century textile mill machinery spinning cotton yarn into cloth at The Museum of Science and Industry, and we learned a bit about the working conditions at the mills.  Manchester – dirty, noisy and overcrowded – was the model for Milton in British novelist Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, published in 1855, which centers on the romance between the idealistic Margaret Hale and cotton-mill owner John Thornton.

A nook in the Sculpture Hall Café in the Town Hall.

The cotton industry made Manchester the wealthiest city in the British Empire during that time, and its architecture reflected that proud status.  The magnificent Gothic Revival Town Hall (1868 – 1877) designed by Alfred Waterhouse (1830 – 1905) dominates the city center, and its Sculpture Hall Café offers a secluded, rather posh environment for brunch or afternoon tea amid marble busts of former town alderman and other local dignitaries of the era. 

In front of the Town Hall, in Albert Square, Manchester’s Albert Memorial was completed in 1865 as the first of several memorials to Prince Albert (1819 – 1861) including the one designed by Sir Gilbert Scott (1811 – 1878) in Kensington Gardens, London, unveiled by Queen Victoria in 1872.

It was easy to find Tissot’s “Hush (The Concert, 1875)” at the Manchester Art Gallery.

In 1876, James Tissot began exhibiting his work outside London, marketing it to the newly-rich men of the Industrial north.  Today, six of his finest works can be found in museums there.  The Manchester Art Gallery’s collection includes Hush! (The Concert), painted in 1875 and displayed at the Royal Academy exhibition at the height of Tissot’s success in London.  The collection also includes The Warrior’s Daughter (A Convalescent, c. 1878), which was not on display when we visited.

A Visit to the Yacht (c. 1873), by James Tissot.  Private Collection.  (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

British painter George Adolphus Storey (1834 – 1919), in his 1899 memoirs, described a high-spirited “railway picnic party” in 1873 with a large group of men returning from a lavish house party in Manchester hosted by art dealer William Agnew (1825 – 1910):  Tissot, painters Ferdinand Heilbuth (1826 – 1889), Philip Hermogenes Calderon, R.A. (1833 – 1898), George Dunlop Leslie, A.R.A. (1835 – 1921), David Wilkie Wynfield (1837–1887), William Yeames, A.R.A. (1835 – 1918), and Frederick Walker (1840 – 1875), editor Shirley Brooks (1816 – 1874) and “the Punch men,” pianist, conductor and composer Frederic Hymen Cowen (1852 – 1935), and a host of others including opera star Charles Santley (1834 – 1922), who “sang us many of his delightful songs.”

Tissot’s work was being purchased by the newly-rich in Northern England as early as 1873, when he painted A Visit to the Yacht, which he sold directly to Agnew’s, London for £650, as La Visite au Navire.  Shortly after, Agnew’s, Liverpool sold the picture to David Jardine (1827 – 1911), a Liverpool timber broker, ship owner and art collector who eventually became Chairman of the Cunard Steamship Company.

With Tissot’s Portrait of Mrs Catherine Smith Gill and Two of her Children (1877) at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

We took a day trip to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool to see Tissot’s Portrait of Mrs Catherine Smith Gill and Two of her Children (1877), one of the largest works he ever had produced.

Mrs. Gill’s husband, Mr. Chapple Gill (c.1833 – 1901/2), was the son of Robert Gill, a Liverpool cotton broker of Knotty Cross and R. & C. Gill; the son joined the business in 1857 and had risen to senior partner [by 1880, he became head of the firm].  He commissioned French painter Tissot, then living in London, to paint a portrait of his wife, Catherine Smith Carey (1847-1916), whom he had married on June 10, 1868 at Childwall.  She was the only child of Thomas Carey (1809 – c. 1875), a wealthy, retired estate agent.  Tissot’s portrait of Catherine Smith Gill shows her – heiress at age 30 – sitting in the drawing-room window of her mother’s home at Lower Lee, at Woolton near Liverpool, which was built by Catherine’s father.  Tissot lived at the red sandstone mansion for eight weeks while painting the portrait, in which he depicts Catherine with her two-year-old son Robert Carey and six-year-old daughter Helen; she was to have another boy and two more girls.

Outside Liverpool, we visited Sudley House, the former home of George Holt (1825 – 1896), a self-made Victorian shipping-line owner and merchant who built an impressive art collection that includes work by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Edwin Landseer, J.E. Millais, and J.M.W. Turner.  Since British aristocrats did not patronize contemporary French painters, George Holt was just the type of client that Tissot catered to in England:  newly-wealthy men who would invest in art purchased from dealers and at exhibitions rather than from commissions.  Since there is no home of a contemporary client of Tissot’s to tour (e.g. Mr. Chapple Gill), it was quite insightful to see George Holt’s home and collection, now managed by National Museums Liverpool.

Kirkgate at the York Castle Museum.

My indefatigable husband and travel partner.

We continued our Victorian Tour in York, at the York Castle Museum’s Kirkgate, a recreated Victorian street where we were immersed in the experience of strolling over the cobblestones past the goods on display for the rich and the backstreets of the poor.  Kirkgate has everything from a hansom cab like the one Tissot depicted in Going to Business (Going to the City, c. 1879), to a confectioner’s, schoolroom, police cell, millinery shop, watch shop, a gentleman’s clothier, stables, privy, and alleys, one of which smelled strongly of horse manure in a distinctly authentic sensory detail.  The shops are based on real York businesses that operated between 1870 and 1901.  Afterwards, I tried on a bustle gown and smart little chapeau.  While the gown was just a costume, without a corset or foundation garments, I was surprised how very hot, heavy, and constricting it felt.

At the York Castle Museum, in front of the Victorian parlor.

During our visit to the National Railway Museum in York, we were able to look in the windows of Queen Victoria’s palatial train carriages, upholstered in yards of bright blue silk, as well as a train outfitted by King Edward VII in 1902 for his own use, complete with a smoking saloon and full bathroom.  It was Queen Victoria’s delight in train travel than soothed the qualms of the general public, frightened that the wind generated by the speed of this new mode of transportation would blow their heads off.

One of Queen Victoria’s royal train carriages.

Gentleman in a Railway Carriage (1872), by James Tissot.  Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, U.S.A.  (Photo: Wikiart)

Lucy in a railway carriage.

We continued on to Nottingham, a bustling city boasting glorious Victorian buildings by architects including Watson Fothergill (1841 – 1928), who designed over a hundred houses, banks, churches, shops and warehouses in the Nottingham area from about 1864 to 1912.

A Fothergill design.

Nottingham.

Though Fothergill’s Gothic Revival and Old English vernacular style buildings now are interspersed with modern architecture, we felt surrounded by the Victorian experience.

Nottingham Station, first built by the Midland Railway in 1848, designed by architect J.E. Hall of Nottingham.

Tissot’s Waiting for the Ferry at the Falcon Tavern (1874) was exhibited at Nottingham Castle, still an art gallery today, and at Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1887.

Waiting for the Ferry at the Falcon Tavern (1874), by James Tissot.  Speed Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.A.

In Birmingham, where the industrial steam engine was invented and which became a manufacturing powerhouse, the architecture was grander than in Nottingham.  Queen Victoria granted Birmingham city status in 1889, and the vibrant center of the second most populous city in Britain is now under the gaze of the bronze monument to her in Victoria Square.

We received a lovely private tour of Birmingham’s Anglican Cathedral from a kind and knowledgeable volunteer on duty.  Designed in the Baroque style in 1715, it features soaring Pre-Raphaelite stained glass windows designed and manufactured by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris in 1880.  The Cathedral was bombed during World War II – just after the priceless stained glass windows had been removed and hidden in a slate mine in Wales.

Walking along a Victorian-era street in Birmingham.

We viewed the Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces at the imposing Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, opened by the Prince of Wales in 1885, during a leisurely afternoon before relaxing over tea in the Edwardian Tea Rooms.

Resting at the Edwardian Tea Rooms.

The common yard of the Birmingham Back to Backs.

Outside the common laundry room.

Dashing to the other side of town, we missed the last house tour of the day at the Birmingham Back to Backs, operated as a museum by the National Trust, but the staff kindly allowed us to look at the exhibit above the gift shop and also to walk around the common yard that was shared by several families who lived in these inner-city homes that were three storeys high and one room deep.  Restored by the Birmingham Conservation Trust in collaboration with architects S. T. Walker & Duckham, the Back to Backs were opened to the public in 2004 as the city’s last surviving example of such houses.  After the Public Health Act of 1875, no more back to backs were built, but people continued to live in the crowded existing housing units until the 1950s.  Thousands of similar houses were built throughout the 19th century, for the rapidly increasing population of Britain’s expanding industrial towns, including the families of workers in button making, glasswork, woodwork, leatherwork, locksmithing, tailoring, and jewellery trades.  The common yard was quite small for exercise of those many family members, with a shared laundry room and privies.

While James Tissot was wealthy and would have had little contact with this aspect of Victorian life, it nevertheless was the social reality of his time and the underpinning of many luxury goods and services he would have purchased.

St. Pancras International

In London, we stayed near St. Pancras rail station, the most splendid Victorian edifice of all.  Designed by Sir Gilbert Scott (1811 – 1878) and opened in 1868, it was a marvel of Victorian engineering and a masterpiece of Victorian Gothic architecture.

A staircase in the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel.

St. Pancras Station was built by the Midland Railway Company to connect London with some of England’s major cities:  Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Bradford.  By 1876, the station offered services to Edinburgh.  In June, 1874, the first Pullman service in the U.K. was available, with a restaurant car and sleeping accommodations, and by 1878 this service extended to the northern tip of Scotland.

So when James Tissot participated in that “railway picnic party” in 1873, returning from art dealer William Agnew’s lavish house party in Manchester, he would have traveled to and from the sumptuous new St. Pancras Station, convenient to his villa in St. John’s Wood.

Another view of the staircase.

St. Pancras declined over time and finally was restored from 2004 – 2007, officially re-opening as St. Pancras International in 2007 in an elaborate opening ceremony attended by Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh, with a concert performed by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra.  Passengers now can travel to Paris and Brussels, among other destinations.

Inside and out, St. Pancras International and the luxury five-star St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel, which was the talk of London when it opened in 1876, are simply jaw-dropping.  My husband and I had cocktails at The Gilbert Scott bar, where I couldn’t take my eyes off the shimmering painted ceiling.

The ceiling in The Gilbert Scott at the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel.

The Regent’s Park.

The Regent’s Park.

Another incredible place that James Tissot lived near and would have enjoyed is The Regent’s Park, developed by architect John Nash (1752 – 1835), a friend of the Prince Regent (later King George IV).  A vast, rounded green area north of London, The Regent’s Park features a large lake, landscaped gardens, an open-air theater, the London Zoo, and much more.

Tissot’s friend since 1859, the Dutch-born painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836 –1912), lived in Townshend House on the north side of the park near the Regent’s Canal, which we cruised along in a canal boat.

A waterbus on the Regent’s Canal.

Later, we visited the exotically-decorated Leighton House Museum, the former home of the distinguished Victorian artist Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830 – 1896), in Holland Park.  There we viewed the extensive Alma-Tadema exhibition, “Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity,” (July 7 – October 29, 2017), the largest exhibition devoted to the extraordinarily successful Victorian painter held in London since 1913.  The exhibition includes a few contemporary photos of the house at 17 (now 44) Grove End Road in St. John’s Wood that Alma-Tadema purchased from James Tissot in 1883 and lived in from 1885 until his death in 1912.  In 2014, my husband and I toured this large home, now a private residence.

Caricature of Frederic Leighton, by James Tissot. Published in Vanity Fair on June 29, 1872, the caption reads “A sacrifice to the Graces.” (Photo: Wikimedia.)

Queen Victoria’s Coronation gown and golden robe.

At Kensington Palace, we took in the “Victoria Revealed” exhibit (through November 12, 2017), walking through the rooms in which the young princess resided.  I saw the staircase below the room she was in when she learned that her uncle had died and, at age 18, she had become Queen. Here in the Red Saloon, she held her first Privy Council meeting.

Several of Victoria’s gowns were on display, including her delicate gold coronation robe replicated for the current television drama “Victoria,” starring Jenna Coleman, as well as a smart military-style riding jacket with a waist so small it is hard to believe anyone could ever wear it.

A resplendent staircase at Kensington Palace.

The staircase to the room that Victoria was in when she learned that she was Queen, with a quote from her diary.

Foreign Visitors (1874), by James Tissot.

My husband and I spent a lot of time at Trafalgar Square, where the portico of the National Gallery of Art and the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields provided the backdrop (though slightly altered, which did not endear him to the British art critics) for Tissot’s two versions of Foreign Visitors (1874).  Tissot exhibited the larger version at the Royal Academy in 1874.

On the last day of our Victorian Tour, where else could we have afternoon tea but in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s luxurious Gamble, Poynter, and Morris Rooms, beckoning with multi-colored ceramic, stained glass and enamel, opened in 1868 as the first-ever museum restaurant?  The scones, as big as our faces, were a fitting finale to our Victorian tour – along with one last trip from the awe-inspiring St. Pancras station.

Ceramic-lined staircase at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The Gamble Room at the V&A (with updated lighting fixtures).

The Poynter Room at the V&A.

One last chance for afternoon tea – until next time!

© 2017 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

Related Posts: 

Paris, June 1871

London, June 1871

A visit to James Tissot’s house & Kathleen Newton’s grave

The James Tissot Tour of Paris

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).    See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

James Tissot exhibited Hush! (The Concert, 1875) at the Royal Academy exhibition at the height of his success in London. 

Hush! (The Concert, 1875), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas; 29.02 x 44.17 in. (73.7 x 112.2 cm.). Manchester Art Gallery, U.K. (Photo: wikiart.org)

In this painting, Tissot depicts a crowded Kensington salon, said to have been hosted by Lord and Lady Coope, which features a performer believed to be Moravian violinst Wilma Neruda (1838 – 1911).  Acquired by the Manchester Art Gallery in 1933, Hush! measures 29.02 by 44.17 in. (73.7 by 112.2 cm) and is on display in the Balcony Gallery.

On my recent trip to England, I took these close-ups for those of you who can’t get to Manchester to see this intriguing picture.

The pianist and his assistant prepare to begin as the violinist lifts the instrument to her chin.

She’s beautiful, fashionable, and clearly accomplished, but she is young and nervous.

The two men at the piano are professionals who take her seriously, and they are anxious to do justice to her talent.

The two Indian princes, or dignitaries, lean forward in anticipation of the music by this star.

But the Society guests sitting behind them and to their left seem less than excited.

In fact, they look bored out of their minds and dreading this tedious folly of their hosts.

But it is, at least, a chance to be seen.  With shoulders like these, front row center is the place to be, whether you’re a music aficionado or not.

Making an impression with a dramatic late entrance works, too…

…though you’re bound to be criticized for upstaging those too timid to think of it themselves.

Meanwhile, those relegated to the staircase don’t seem to mind.

At least one can redeem the evening by carrying on a business discussion in a back corner –

– who needs to impress the wallflower?

These two are wondering how long they’ll have to wait for the liquor to start flowing.

The men behind them, and the two women with them, just want it over already so they can sit down to dinner.

Not a group of violin connoisseurs.

However, the thing does provide some unforeseen opportunities.

It’s Ladies’ Night.

The violinist is not the belle of the evening…

…but rather the lady with the star-shaped diamond brooch in her hair…

…and the scene-stealing, painted fan.

Hush! is a lovely picture that, on closer inspection, is quite witty.  However, it suffered from the increasing notice Tissot’s work was attracting.  In attempting to equal the success that he had with Too Early at the Royal Academy of 1873, Tissot had miscalculated with The Ball on Shipboard in 1874.  That picture was criticized for lacking a coherent narrative, for its vivid colors criticized as “garish and almost repellent” by the reviewer for The Illustrated London News, and especially for its vulgar show of nouveaux riches, with “not a lady in a score of female figures,” according to the Athenaeum’s reviewer.

Tissot took heed of his critics.  With Hush!, he offered a clear narrative, used a muted palette, with pastel colors – and clearly portrayed London Society in this opulent oval drawing room, with its crystal chandelier, profuse floral displays, and scores of bona fide ladies.

Fashion historian James Laver (1899 – 1975), in his 1936 biography of James Tissot, claimed that Tissot had received an invitation to the Coopes’ at which Madame Neruda performed, but that he did not have permission to make portraits of any of the guests.  Instead, he painted types, some based on models he used in other paintings, including the old gentleman with the white whiskers in the left corner who also appears in Reading the News (1874), in the center of The Ball on Shipboard (c. 1874), and in The Warrior’s Daughter (A Convalescent, c. 1878).  The older, white-haired woman on the right also appears in A Convalescent (c. 1876) and Holyday (c 1876).

Tissot added his painter friends, Italian-born Giuseppe de Nittis (1846 – 1884) and German-born Ferdinand Heilbuth (1826 – 1889), to the group standing in the doorway.  (De Nittis is next to the jamb on the left, and Heilbuth is next to him.)

The critics were not amused.  The Illustrated London News reviewer wrote that Hush! showed English Society through “a Gallic sneer,” adding, “But polite people will, of course, be thankful to see themselves as a polished Frenchman sees them.”

Though the French painter was producing pictures that are now considered among his best – or perhaps because of this – Tissot was increasingly unable to please the British art establishment.  The more he succeeded financially, the harsher his critics.  In 1873, he sold Too Early through art dealer William Agnew (1825 – 1910) – who specialized in “high-class modern paintings” – for 1,050 guineas.  Agnew purchased The Ball on Shipboard from Tissot the following year, and in 1875, purchased Hush! directly from the wall of the Royal Academy by for 1,200 guineas.

A chapter in my book, The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, dramatizes this episode in his new life in London – read it to immerse yourself in the world of Society glamour and tragedy that he knew.

©  2017 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

Related Posts:

Tissot in the U.K.: Northern England

A Closer Look at Tissot’s “Too Early”

A Closer Look at Tissot’s “The Ball on Shipboard”

A Closer Look at Tissot’s “The Fan”

James Tissot’s Models à la Mode

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).  See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

James Tissot’s working methods reflected his academic training in Paris.  Before executing the final version of a picture, he made meticulous studies of its composition as well as detailed studies of the figures in it.  Often, he experimented with different poses and positions within the work.

Jeunes femmes regardant des objets japonais (Young Women Looking at Japanese Objects, 1869), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 24 by 19 in. (60.96 by 48.26 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

On a recent trip to the Tate Britain, I was able to view one of Tissot’s studies for the kneeling figure in Jeunes femmes regardant des objets japonais (Young Women looking at Japanese Objects, 1869).  The study is not on display, but one of the joys of conducting research in London is having access to works in storage by appointment.  It felt like a great luxury to view this and other treasures in the privacy of the Tate Study Room.

Tissot enrolled at the Académie des Beaux-Arts on March 9, 1857, though there is little documentation on the regularity of his attendance at classes, which included mathematics, anatomy and drawing, but not painting.  He studied painting independently under Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin (1809 – 1864) and Louis Lamothe (1822 – 1869), both of whom had been students of the great Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 – 1867) and taught his principles. Flandrin, who had earned a first-class medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1855, was a prolific artist, and he increasingly directed his students to his former student, Louis Lamothe.  Lamothe was a clear and precise draftsman with a passion for detail, and Tissot acknowledged that his own work was significantly influenced by Lamothe’s instruction.

Self portrait (c.1865), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 49.8 x 30.2 cm (19 5/8 x 11 7/8 in.). The Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California. Museum purchase, Mildred Anna Williams Collection, 1961.16. Image courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot,” by Lucy Paquette © 2012.

James Tissot quickly achieved success in the Second Empire art establishment, through a combination of artistic virtuosity, confidence, charm and financial aptitude. In 1866, thirty-year-old James Tissot bought land to build a villa on the most prestigious of Baron Haussmann’s grand new boulevards, the eleven-year-old avenue de l’Impératrice (now avenue Foch). By the Salon of 1868, Tissot had occupied his newly built mansion:  the intriguing details in La Cheminée (The Fireplace, c. 1869, private collection) and L’escalier (The Staircase, 1869, private collection) almost certainly were painted from its opulent interior.

Tissot’s studio, a showcase for his renowned collection of Japanese art, became a landmark to see when touring Paris – and, for Tissot, it was a brilliant marketing tool to attract commissions.  His collection of Japanese art and objets had grown to include a model of a Japanese ship, a Chinese shrine and hardwood table, and a Japanese black lacquered household altar, along with dozens of embroidered silk kimonos, Japanese dolls, folding screens and porcelains.  In 1869, he assimilated these exotic items into elegant compositions in three similar paintings featuring young women looking at Japanese objects.  [See James Tissot’s brilliant marketing tool, 1869.]

The drawing at the Tate reveals how Tissot experimented with the composition of one of the versions of this picture, in studies for the figure of the woman in black, kneeling to get a better look at the details painted on the folding screen.

Studies of a Kneeling Woman, by James Tissot. Graphite on paper, 12 7/8 by 19 1/4 in. (33 by 48.8 cm).  Tate, London.

He initially drew the woman kneeling, looking slightly to the right so that her face is not in full profile.  Then, to the side, he sketched a second version of her head turned slightly left, so that while she still is not in full profile, we see more of her face as well as her chic hat.

Detail, Studies of a Kneeling Woman, by James Tissot. Tate, London.

Between the two head studies, Tissot sketches a more graceful position of the fingers the woman holds under her chin.  In the painting, we can see that he chose to use the second option for her right hand.

Detail, Studies of a Kneeling Woman, by James Tissot. Tate, London.

But he knew from the beginning how he wanted to paint her left hand, though he decides to part her little finger and raise it slightly, in a more graceful gesture.

Detail, Studies of a Kneeling Woman, by James Tissot. Tate, London.

In his studies, Tissot uses only a few pencil strokes in delineating the woman’s lovely face.  In the finished painting, Tissot chose to present her in full profile.

Detail, Jeunes femmes regardant des objects japonais (1869), by James Tissot.

Detail, Studies of a Kneeling Woman, by James Tissot. Tate, London.

Detail of Studies of a Kneeling Woman, by James Tissot. Tate, London.

Tissot’s work is known (and often derided) for showing every ruffle and trim of fabric on the women’s costumes.  Interestingly, even his study shows every detail of each pleat, flounce, and drape of fabric, though the woman’s gown in the painting differs.  For example, the cuff in the study is wider than that in the painting.  The tiers of pleated flounces at the bottom of the skirt are different in the painting, and so is the hat.  This drawing indicates that while Tissot made careful preparatory studies, he was not bound by them in his finished paintings.

It is amusing to imagine him seated at his easel before a beautiful live model, completely lost in his work and constitutionally incapable of merely sketching the outline of the gown or indicating its trimmings with the few quick strokes he used in his studies of the woman’s face.

A special thank you to the wonderful staff at the Tate Britain Study Room.

Related posts:

Tissot’s Study for the family of the Marquis de Miramon (1865)

“The three wonders of the world”: Tissot’s japonisme,1864-67

James Tissot’s brilliant marketing tool, 1869

© 2017 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).  See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

A month ago, I flew to London to visit “The EY Exhibition:  Impressionists in London:  French Artists in Exile 1870-1904″ at Tate Britain.  Its premise is summarized by the Tate:  “In the 1870s, France was devastated by the Franco-Prussian war and insurrection in Paris, driving artists to seek refuge across the Channel.  Their experiences in London and the friendships that developed not only influenced their own work but also contributed to the British art scene.”

The exhibition is huge, and the galleries were crowded on each of the two days I visited.  There is a great deal of beauty on display, but it’s also a very ambitious, cerebral show, so you have to pace yourself.

James Tissot fought to defend Paris in the Franco-Prussian War, served as a stretcher-bearer, participated in the bloody Commune the following spring, and fled to London in June, 1871.  For me, this show was an opportunity to view several works by Tissot never before displayed in public, as well as many of Tissot’s most intriguing oil paintings in a single venue.  These have been cleaned for the occasion, and the colors are as vibrant as if they’d been newly painted.  I was one of many visitors transfixed by the restored beauty of Tissot’s brushwork and the details revealed.

The Green Room of the Théâtre-Français (1877), by James Tissot.  Courtesy of http://www.jamestissot.org

I’ve created the following virtual tour for those who cannot make it to London to see this – or who have not yet seen it, and may soon.  Commentary is mine unless otherwise noted.

In the first gallery of the exhibition, with its walls painted a somber aubergine, I was one of many fascinated by sketches and watercolors Tissot made during the Franco-Prussian War.  Since I have a special interest in his life and work during the war, the Siege of Paris, and the Commune, I’m afraid I may have impeded traffic in this section of the gallery.

For additional information on this tumultuous period, see my posts:

James Tissot and The Artists’ Brigade, 1870-71

Paris, June 1871

London, June 1871

The Artists’ Rifles, London

Tissot’s elegant watercolor, The Wounded Soldier (c. 1870), acquired by the Tate in 2016, is a singularly beautiful image of a restless young man in uniform perched on the arm of a sofa.  Thanks to the staff in the Tate Study Room, I had a chance to view this work closely on an earlier visit to London in the weeks before this exhibition.  It likely was painted within the city walls of Paris, where the wounded were brought to convalesce in public buildings.  The Wounded Soldier is James Tissot’s most sensitive, profound, and arresting work and shows him in a new light.  The exhibition text notes that he kept it in his studio all his life, never exhibiting it.  This is the first time it has been displayed in public.  Photography is prohibited in the exhibition, but click here to see an image of it.

In the bitter aftermath of the war, French citizens engaged in a bloody uprising against the new republican government.  My research indicates that Tissot participated in the Commune in some way, and like many of his peers, including Manet, Degas and Renoir, he seemed sympathetic to the plight of the Communards when the government ended the standoff with mass executions.  Tissot, renowned for painting the ruffles and ribbons of women’s fashions, documented this period in French history in a way no one else did.  The exhibition features his eyewitness account in watercolor, The Execution of Communards by French Government Forces at Fortifications in the Bois de Boulogne, 29 May 1871 (private collection), displayed in public for the first time.  This horrifying image was sent along with a letter to Lady Waldegrave (1821 – 1879), a prominent Liberal hostess in London whom Tissot likely met through J.E. Millais, if not his friend Tommy Bowles (Thomas Gibson Bowles (1841 – 1922).

The letter has been expertly translated from the original French by the exhibition curator, Dr. Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, Assistant Curator 1850-1915 at Tate Britain.  In it, Tissot writes a graphic stream-of-consciousness narrative of executions of Communards, or suspected Communards, by government soldiers.  Dr. Corbeau-Parsons, who organized the exhibition, notes that his “broken language” and his lack of grammatically correct accents betrays how traumatized he was in witnessing this horror, and yet Tissot is surprisingly thorough in relating this experience to Lady Waldegrave.  Exhibition visitors stop to read this translated letter in its entirety.  There is so little documentation on Tissot that it is as if he finally has a voice; otherwise, his work must speak for itself.  But this exhibition, with its new works by Tissot, gives him a chance to do that.

Passing through the second gallery, which refreshes the mood of the exhibition with its sky blue walls, I found my gold mine of Tissot’s oils in the spacious third room, where the tan walls come alive with his colors.

First, take a look at the smaller items that rarely (if ever) have been displayed in public.  Here, you will find Tissot’s sketch of the handsome young Bowles,  used as an illustration in The Defence of Paris; narrated as it was seen, published in London in 1871, Bowles’ eyewitness account as a special correspondent for The Morning Post.  (Incidentally, this book is a great read, as Bowles was terribly witty and writes with a startlingly unperturbed and ironic tone.)

For additional information on the relationship between Tissot and Bowles, see my posts:

1869: Tissot meets “the irresistible” Tommy Bowles, founder of British Vanity Fair

James Tissot & Tommy Bowles Brave the Siege Together: October 1870

Tissot’s graphite drawing, A Cantinière of the National Guard (1870-71), is much more interesting than the engraving of it used as an illustration in Bowles’ book.  A cantinière, the exhibition text explains, was “something like a nurse and a sutler (supplier of provisions) accompanying the troops – cantinières also took up arms on many occasions, playing an increasingly important role in the siege.”

Portrait of Mrs. B (Mrs. Thomas Gibson Bowles, 1876), by James Tissot.  (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

Don’t miss Tissot’s etching of Bowle’s wife, Portrait of Mrs. B (1876).  Tommy Bowles was the illegitimate son of Thomas Milner Gibson and a servant, Susannah Bowles.  Jessica Evans-Gordon, daughter of Major-General C. G. Evans Gordon, Governor of Netley Hospital, married Bowles in December 1875 and died at 35 in 1887, having borne him four children.  Though Tommy Bowles was quite high-spirited in his youth, he was devoted to the prudent Jessie, so very sober in this image.  After her death, he wrote “So bright and joyous, so gentle and gracious a spirit as hers…still more rarely has been so ordered by a sense of duty.  She was as near perfect wife and mother as may be.”

Then, indulge in the visual feast of some of Tissot’s best, and most well-known, oil paintings – brimming with his wit, flair, psychological insight and unparalleled ability to capture moments of Victorian life and transport us to his world.

Captain Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1870), by James Tissot.  Oil on panel, 50 by 61 cm.  National Portrait Gallery, London.  (Photo by Lucy Paquette, 2014).

Napoléon III, by Tissot (Photo:  Wiki)

Tissot, 33 when he painted this small picture of the debonair Captain Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1870).  Tissot owned a villa on the most prestigious avenue in Paris (now avenue Foch), and he occasionally supplied his British friend Tommy Bowles with caricatures of prominent men for Vanity Fair, Tommy’s new Society magazine which had made its début in London in 1868.  (The exhibition features Tissot’s caricature, Napoléon III, Emperor of France, published in Vanity Fair on September 4, 1869.)  One of Tommy Bowles’ closest friends was the dashing Gus Burnaby (Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, 1842 – 1885), a captain in the privileged Royal Horse Guards, the cavalry regiment that protected the monarch.  Gus, a member of the Prince of Wales’ set, had suggested the name, Vanity Fair, lent Bowles half of the necessary £200 in start-up funding, and then volunteered to go to Spain to chronicle his adventures for the satirical magazine.  All Burnaby’s letters, which were first published on December 19, 1868 and continued through 1869, were titled “Out of Bounds” and signed “Convalescent” (he suffered intermittent bouts of digestive ailments and depression throughout his life).  Tommy Bowles was 29 when he commissioned Tissot to paint Burnaby’s portrait.

[To learn about another portrait commission from Bowles to Tissot (not included in the exhibition), see my post:  James Tissot’s “Miss Sydney Milner-Gibson” (c. 1872).]

Les Adieux (The Farewells) 1871, by James Tissot, oil on canvas, 100.3 by 62.5 cm.  Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.  Photo courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, by Lucy Paquette © 2012

A Huguenot (1851-52), by J.E. Millais.  (Photo:  Wiki)

James Tissot fled Paris in June, 1871.  He arrived in London with less than one hundred francs, and with the help of a handful of friends, he proceeded to rebuild his career.

In 1872, Tissot exhibited Les Adieux (The Farewells, 1871) at the Royal Academy.  A sentimental costume piece calculated to appeal to the British public, it is displayed adjacent to J.E. Millais’ A Huguenot (1851-52), which it greatly resembles.  [See my post, Was James Tissot a Plagiarist?]

Les Adieux was reproduced as a steel engraving by John Ballin and published by Pilgeram and Lefèvre in 1873 – an indication of its popularity.

This exhibition is a great opportunity to see this painting.

Too Early (1873), by James Tissot.  Oil on canvas, 71 by 102 cm.  Guildhall Art Gallery.  (Photo by Lucy Paquette, 2014)

James Tissot exhibited Too Early at the Royal Academy in 1873, where it was his first big success after moving to London from Paris two years previously.  According to his friend, the painter Louise Jopling (1843 – 1933), Too Early “made a great sensation…It was a new departure in Art, this witty representation of modern life.”  Too Early was purchased by London art dealer William Agnew (1825 – 1910) – who specialized in “high-class modern paintings” – and sold in March, 1873 (before its exhibition at the Royal Academy that year) to Charles Gassiot for £1,155.  Gassiot (1826 – 1902) was a London wine merchant and art patron who, with his wife Georgiana, donated a number of his paintings to the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, including Too Early.  For more on this painting, see my post, A Closer Look at Tissot’s “Too Early”.

London Visitors (c. 1874), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 86.3 by 63.5 cm.  Milwaukee Art Museum.  (Photo: Wikipedia)

According to interesting new research by Tissot scholar Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, this painting is not a smaller replica of London Visitors in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, as formerly believed.  Mrs. Matyjaszkiewicz has learned from records in the National Gallery Archive that the smaller painting was completed several months before the other.  First called The Portico, the picture in this exhibition was sold by Thomas Agnew & Sons as Country Cousins.  This is a rare opportunity to see London Visitors up close.

The Empress Eugénie and the Prince Impérial in the Grounds at Camden Place, Chislehurst (c. 1874), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 105 by 150 cm.  Musée Nationale du Château de Compiègne. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

The Empress Eugénie and the Prince Impérial in the Grounds at Camden Place, Chislehurst (c. 1874) depicts the exiled French Empress (1826 – 1920), living outside London after the collapse of the Second Empire, and her son, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (1856 – 1879), who would be killed at age 23, in the Zulu War.  The only child of Napoléon III of France, he was accepted to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in 1872 and is pictured in his uniform as a cadet.  The Empress is in her first year of mourning following the death of her husband in January, 1873, after surgery to remove bladder stones.

Alison McQueen, in Empress Eugénie and the Arts:  Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2017), states that the picture was commissioned by the Empress and adds, “The wicker chairs and carpet reappear in A Convalescent (c. 1875-76), which further suggests Tissot constructed these scenes in his studio and was not recording mother and son from life studies executed on the property at Camden.”

According to Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, who wrote the exhibition catalogue entry, he painted this double portrait of the exiled French royals for the 1875 Royal Academy exhibition, but it was rejected, along with two others (while yet two others, Hush! (The Concert) and The Bunch of Lilacs, were accepted.)

The painting was purchased by Kaye Knowles, Esq. (1835-1886), a client of London art dealer Algernon Moses Marsden [1848-1920, see Who was Algernon Moses Marsden?].  Knowles, whose vast wealth came from shares in his family’s Lancashire coal mining business, owned a large collection of paintings by contemporary artists, including three other oils by Tissot.

Hush! (The Concert, 1875), by James Tissot.  Oil on canvas, 73.7 by 112.2 cm.  Manchester Art Gallery.  (Photo: Wikiart.org)

James Tissot displayed Hush! (The Concert) at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1875, at the height of his success in London.  It depicts a crowded Kensington salon, said to have been hosted by Lord and Lady Coope, which features a performer believed to be Moravian violinist Wilma Neruda (1838 – 1911).  Though Tissot received an invitation to this soirée, he was not given permission to make portraits of any of the guests.  Acquired by the Manchester Art Gallery in 1933, Hush! is a lovely picture that, on closer inspection, is quite witty.  For more on this painting, see my post, A Closer Look at Tissot’s “Hush! (The Concert)”.

View of the Garden at 17 Grove End Road (c. 1882), by James Tissot.  Oil on canvas, 27 by 21 cm. Geffrye Museum of the Home.  Courtesy http://www.jamestissot.org

By 1873, two years after Tissot arrived in London, he had established himself in a Queen Anne-style villa at 17 (now 44), Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood.  He designed his garden as a blend of English-style flower beds and plantings familiar to him from French parks.  Gravel paths led to kitchen gardens and greenhouses for flowers, fruit and vegetables.  View of the Garden at 17 Grove End Road (c. 1874-1882) is unusual in that Tissot seldom depicted a landscape that was not a background for figures.  Previously in a private collection, View of the Garden was sold to Agnew’s at Sotheby’s, London in 2000 and purchased by the Geffrye in 2004.

Summer (A Portrait, 1876), by James Tissot.  Oil on canvas, 91.4 by 50.8 cm.  Tate.

Summer (A Portrait), 1876 is radiant and has benefited from recent cleaning.  The woman’s white muslin gown, with its lemon-yellow stain bows, shimmers, and details such as her ring, and the designs on the blue-green curtains, pull you into the scene.

This painting was exhibited by Tissot at the new Grosvenor Gallery, London, from May to June 1877 as A Portrait.

The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth), c.1876, by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 68.6 by 91.8 cm.  Tate.

Though I’ve visited the Tate numerous times, this is the first time I’ve seen The Gallery of HMS Calcutta in person.  What can I say – it’s one of Tissot’s masterpieces, and I was rooted to the spot studying it, as was everyone around me.  You just cannot take your eyes off the gowns, the bows, the faces, the curvaceous wrought-iron railing, the way Tissot painted the caned chairs, the curves of the windows, the rigging of the ships in the distance…it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet for the eyes.  Tissot exhibited it at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 to rather cutting reviews.  Go see it while you can, and form your own opinion.

Also in this third gallery are a few etchings and photographs of Kathleen Newton (1854 –1882), Tissot’s young mistress and muse from about 1876 until her death from tuberculosis six years later.  An idea for a future exhibition would be a display of the numerous images of Mrs. Newton that Tissot produced, with all known photographs of her and of the two of them together, but this exhibition is not about their relationship.

Keep walking, because in a further gallery showcasing images of “British Sports, Crowds, and Parks,” you will find more of Tissot’s paintings.

Holyday (c. 1876), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 76.2 by 99.4 cm.  Tate.

In Holyday (c. 1876), Tissot painted members of the famous I Zingari cricket club (which still exists, and is one of the oldest amateur cricket clubs) in their distinctive black, red and gold caps in his garden at 17 Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood, which was only a few hundred yards from Lord’s cricket ground.  Holyday was owned by James Taylor, who lent it for exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery in London from May to June, 1877.  The painting was purchased by the Tate in 1928.

I’ve long wanted to see Holyday up close, and I found it so intriguing.  The painting includes a woman I’d never noticed in print or digital images – she is indicated only by her white straw bonnet, behind the man leaning against a tree on the far right of the picture.  And the addition of the two other women on the picnic blanket is indicated in the bottom left corner by their skirts, one black-and-white striped, one brown, with the soles of her shoes peeking out behind her knife-pleated hemline.  There’s also a little girl, whom I’ve never noticed, sitting at the feet of the old lady in the wicker chair.  This is such a merry picture!  It makes you want to join this lively group for a cup of tea and a slice of cake.

The Ball on Shipboard (c. 1874), by James Tissot.  Tate.  (Photo: Lucy Paquette, 2014)

The Ball on Shipboard (1874) is a large, dramatic, detailed painting that invites speculation:  an enigmatic image as precise as a photograph but which evades precise meaning.  You find yourself transfixed as you try to puzzle it out.

In the center are two women wearing matching blue-and-white yachting gowns.  Scholars have written that Tissot had a fixation with twins, though in the 2013 blockbuster exhibition, “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity”  exhibition curator Gloria Groom of The Art Institute of Chicago asserted that in The Ball on Shipboard, Tissot was satirizing the rise of ready-to-wear fashion (and, of course, the vulgar social climbing efforts of the nouveaux riches).  This is not Tissot’s only painting of women wearing identical ensembles:  see In the Conservatory (1875-76, also known as The Rivals).  In fact, according to my own research, Alexandra, Princess of Wales (1844 – 1925) and her sister, at that time Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna of Russia. (1847 –1928, formerly Princess Dagmar of Denmark), were very close and had a habit of wearing identical ensembles when they were together, setting off a general fad for “double-dressing.”  When the Grand Duchess and her husband the Tsarevich visited London in the summer of 1873, the two sisters wore the same costumes on at least thirteen occasions.

In “Impressionists in London,” it is asserted the pair of women in the center of The Ball on Shipboard actually are the Princess of Wales and Maria Feodorovna of Russia, and the occasion an afternoon dance held on the royal naval frigate HMS Ariadne on August 12, 1873, according to research by Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz.

I’m not on board with this theory.  Making royal portraits on, or of, such an occasion would have required that Tissot receive official permission.  This was unlikely, since he was a foreigner and regarded with suspicion for his participation, real or rumored, in the Paris Commune of 1871.  He was not granted permission to make portraits of any of the guests at Lord and Lady Coopes’ salon for Hush! (The Concert, 1873).   Had he received such permission from the royal family, it would have been common knowledge at the time.  But instead of recognizing this as a royal dance, one reviewer wrote, “The girls who are spread about in every attitude are evidently the ‘high life below stairs’ of the port, who have borrowed their mistresses’ dresses for the nonce,” and another objected to the unseemly amount of cleavage revealed by the women wearing the blue and green day dresses (left of center).  Another critic found in the picture, “no pretty women, but a set of showy rather than elegant costumes, some few graceful, but more ungraceful attitudes, and not a lady in a score of female figures,” and another found it “garish and almost repellent.”  While Tissot’s contemporaries (but interestingly, not Tissot himself) identified the setting as the yearly regatta at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, no one at the time considered this a painting of a royal event.  It also makes no sense that Tissot would have made portraits of these two royal women in their matching nautical gowns – and painted the same gown in Reading the News (c. 1874).  It makes more sense that Tissot seized on the concept of a regatta scene while showcasing his skill at painting women’s fashions during the craze for double-dressing, also celebrated by the pairs of women in blue and in green in the center background.

If The Ball on Shipboard had featured a double portrait of royalty, it was not purchased by anyone connected to the royal family.  London art dealer William Agnew (1825 – 1910) – who specialized in “high-class modern paintings” – purchased The Ball on Shipboard from Tissot that year and sold it to Hilton Philipson (1834 – 1904), a solicitor and colliery owner living at Tynemouth.  It was later owned by equine painter Alfred Munnings (1878 – 1959), who presented it to the Tate in 1937.

On the Thames (1876), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 74.8 by 110 cm.  The Hepworth Wakefield.  Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot” by Lucy Paquette © 2012.

Remember to look behind the partition at the back of the room for On the Thames (c. 1876), a masterpiece of texture:  wood, wicker, fabric, fur, leather, metal, water, and mist.  Take a long, close look at the picnic hamper.

Tissot displayed this picture as The Thames at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1876, the year he painted it.  It was attacked by reviewers for The Times, the Athenaeum, the Spectator and the Graphic as depicting a subject they considered thoroughly unBritish – prostitution.  What else would the Victorians think of a painting of a rakish officer in a boat with two attractive women and a picnic hamper with three bottles of champagne?  The women were perceived as “undeniably Parisian ladies,” and the picture itself, “More French, shall we say, than English?”

This criticism prompted Tissot to paint the more innocent Portsmouth Dockyard (How Happy I Could be with Either!, c. 1877).  A much smaller picture than On the Thames, it is displayed earlier in the exhibition, but I wish the two had been displayed side-by-side.

Portsmouth Dockyard (c. 1877), by James Tissot.  Oil on canvas, 38.1 by 54.6 cm.  Tate.

By this time, you will need to seek seating and sustenance, but your brain will be fully sparked.  The details in all Tissot’s paintings are extraordinary – really enthralling to observe close-up.  To learn more about a number of the Tissot oils in the show, see my posts:

Tissot in the U.K.:  London, at the Tate

Tissot in the U.K.:  London, at The Geffrye & the Guildhall

Tissot in the U.K.: Northern England.

There is a great deal more to “Impressionists in London” than James Tissot, of course, and more than one visit is necessary to take in works by Monet – including a group of his Houses of Parliament series – Pissarro, Sisley, Alphonse Legros, sculptor Aimé-Jules Dalou, André Derain, and others.  But if you love Tissot’s work and want to learn more about him, see this show if you can, and let me know what you think.

“The EY Exhibition: Impressionists in London, French Artists in Exile (1870 – 1904),” November 2, 2017 – May 7, 2018.

Tate Britain

See “James Tissot, the Englishman,” by Cyrille Sciama, Curator of the 19th century collections at the Musée d’arts de Nantes, in the exhibition catalogue.

My gratitude to Alexandra Epps and Dr. Caroline Corbeau-Parsons

for their kindness during my visits to the exhibition.

© 2018 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

View my video, “The Strange Career of James Tissot” (Length:  2:33 minutes).

Related posts:

A spotlight on Tissot at the Met’s “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity”

James Tissot is now in Italy!

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).

See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

NOTE:  If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

It’s a rare thing to see a painting by James Tissot from a private collection.  For this opportunity, I thank a lovely gentlemen I know from Twitter, who alerted me last fall that three of Tissot’s oil paintings were on temporary loan to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.  I made the trip to see Quarrelling (c. 1874-76), The Bunch of Lilacs (1875), and Algernon Moses Marsden (1877).

In Quarrelling, which Tissot exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1876, a stylish couple stand in uncomfortable silence on opposite sides of one of the cast-iron columns in the graceful, curved colonnade that Tissot added to his garden at 17 (now 44), Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood, around 1875.  Copied from the colonnade in Parc Monceau in Paris, it became the backdrop for a number of Tissot’s paintings in the next few years.

Parc Monceau, Paris.  (Photo by Lucy Paquette.)

Everything in this picture is beautiful – and beautifully painted:  the man’s dapper beige lounge suit, his flamboyant tan and white leather spectator shoes, and his straw boater with its black band; the woman’s chic fur-trimmed ensemble, which Tissot used in other paintings, the slick black cast iron, the slightly broken surface of the ornamental pond, and the quietly rippling willow branches.  Enjoy Tissot’s brushwork in the photographs below!

Stay tuned for another private viewing in my next post, “A Closer Look at Tissot’s Algernon Moses Marsden.”

As for The Bunch of Lilacs, one of my favorite of all Tissot’s oil paintings, this is what I found during my visit:

© 2018 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

Related Posts:

A Closer Look at Tissot’s “Too Early”

A Closer Look at Tissot’s “The Fan”

A Closer Look at Tissot’s “The Ball on Shipboard”

A Closer Look at Tissot’s “Hush! (The Concert)”

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).

See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

NOTE:  If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

I recently had the rare opportunity to see James Tissot’s Algernon Moses Marsden, one of three of his oil paintings on temporary loan to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from a private collection.  My thanks to the gentleman on Twitter who kindly drew my attention to this.

James Tissot painted Algernon Moses Marsden’s portrait in 1877, and it remained in the Marsden family for nearly a century.  It’s a compelling image; Marsden, at age 30, appears sophisticated and well-to-do.  Unfortunately, he was a complete cad.  He was Tissot’s art dealer for a short time in the mid-1870s, and the setting of the portrait is the elegant new studio of Tissot’s home in St. John’s Wood [not Marsden’s study, as it formerly was identified].

Marsden was a witty and engaging gambler, bankrupt and rogue who foisted his debts on his father and deserted his wife and ten children.  When his father died in 1884, he disinherited his son but provided legacies for his abandoned family members.  In 1901, bankrupt for at least the third time, Algernon, at age 54, fled to the United States with another woman.

He was bankrupt again in 1912, and he died eight years later in upstate New York.  His tombstone in Mt. Hope Cemetery (Section S) in Rochester, New York, is inscribed:  “MARSDEN Algernon Moses of London, Eng.; d Jan 23, 1920 æ 72y” [at the age of 72 years].

Tissot’s portrait, which captures the man in his moment of youth and apparent success, was sold at Sotheby’s, London in 1971 for $4,838/£2,000.  In 1983, it was sold at Christie’s, London for $65,677/£45,000.  [Hammer prices.]

During my visit to the Ashmolean, I was alone in the gallery with this portrait for some time, and Algernon Moses Marsden is eerily alive.  A highly-educated professional woman I encountered at the museum told me he made her “swoon.”

Enjoy these close-up photographs of the man and that tiger skin – which Tissot uses to provide visual interest to the otherwise plain leather armchair, but which also functions as a startling emblem of Marsden’s virility:  through Tissot, we see Algernon Moses Marsden the way he saw himself.

(And yes, the blue dots are reflections on the glass.)

© 2018 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

Related Posts:

A Closer Look at Tissot’s “Quarrelling”

Who was Algernon Moses Marsden?

Tissot’s Tiger Skin: A Prominent Prop

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).

See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

NOTE:  If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

Exhibition note:

“The EY Exhibition: Impressionists in London, French Artists in Exile (1870 – 1904),” November 2, 2017 – May 7, 2018.

 Curator, Dr. Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, Assistant Curator 1850-1915

Tate Britain

And see “James Tissot, the Englishman,” by Cyrille Sciama, Curator of the 19th century collections at the Musée d’arts de Nantes, in the exhibition catalogue.

Self portrait (c.1865), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 49.8 x 30.2 cm (19 5/8 x 11 7/8 in.). The Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California. Museum purchase, Mildred Anna Williams Collection, 1961.16. Image courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot,” by Lucy Paquette © 2012.

If you’re a regular reader, you know that both my blog and my book, The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, celebrate French painter James Tissot and his work.  You also know that April 1 is my birthday, and that I write an annual April Fool’s Day post, so once again, here’s something a little different for you.

In the nine years that I’ve been researching Tissot, I’ve been startled and mystified by the nature of criticism of his work.  I can tell you my least favorite of his paintings and why I don’t like them.  But I find that Tissot’s critics – past and present – can’t seem to do only that.  Their animosity toward Tissot has a bizarre personal thrust of resentment and spite, as if their dislike of his work is based on some grudge that ensued after a formerly tight friendship, along the lines of “I loved that man until he stole my girlfriend/was promoted over me at work/bought a Ferrari and wouldn’t let me test drive it.”  And yes, these reviewers who love to hate James Tissot almost always happen to be male.

My introduction to the conflation of dislike of Tissot’s work with unhinged hatred of James Tissot himself was a 1985 review of a new Tissot biography published in advance of exhibitions of Tissot’s work in France and the U.S.  The reviewer for The New York Times called his paintings “gloomy and inconclusive,” illustrating “boredom, tinged…with bitterness.”  He continued, weirdly, “As for Tissot himself…Californians have access to him in the debonair but slightly shifty self-portrait that is in the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco…In short order, the devious, would-be jaunty little fellow who looks out at us from Degas’s portrait [at the Metropolitan Museum of Art] was making a fortune in Paris in his early 30’s [sic] and riding high in a fashionable townhouse.”

James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot (c. 1867-68), by Edgar Degas.  Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.

When the reviewer adds, “Unhindered by any personal commitment to anything in particular, he could take time off to see what the public wanted,” you might ask yourself, “So what’s so offensive about a successful single guy in his 30s?”  According to this reviewer:  “But what matters in the end is to get rich with good paintings and not with bad ones.”

Chatterton (1856), by Henry Wallis.  Tate.  (Photo:  Wikipedia.org)

Bill Gates, World Economic Forum 2007 (Photo:  Wikimedia.org)

Why?  Matters to whom?  Who gets to decide whose paintings are good enough for them to “get rich” by, if not those who buy them?  Whose ring are they supposed to kiss – the leader of the Establishment, or the anti-Establishment?  Is there some rule that artists have to prove themselves by suffering for some cause, starving in a garret, dying young, or perhaps killing themselves for being misunderstood, before they are promoted to Officially Important Artist?

Does it count that Tissot fought in the Franco-Prussian War, was wounded in a battle at the front that his unit unexpectedly was sent to one morning?  That he stayed in Paris during the Commune while his peers all fled and alone recorded mass executions by the French Government that no one wanted to know about at the time?  That, after emigrating to London, he was no longer considered a real French artist, nor considered an English one, so his work must speak for itself?  James Tissot became wealthy through his own independent nature, talent, and hard work; isn’t that something universally admired?

Enough people thought, and continue to think, well enough of Tissot’s work that they have paid enormous sums for it, and museum curators think highly enough of Tissot’s work that it hangs in major art museums around the world, from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Tate in London, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.  Why, then, is James Tissot even now such an object of scorn to certain people?

This New York Times reviewer in 1985 summed Tissot up as a “dexterous careerist” and “a minor master, in way above his head.”  As a parting shot, he referred to Tissot’s mistress, the young divorcée Kathleen Newton, as a “concubine…lolling around like a beached porpoise,” modelling for “many a droopy painting.”

The Hammock (1879), by James Tissot. 50 in./127 cm. by 30 in./76.20 cm. Image courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot,” © 2012 by Lucy Paquette

The current EY Exhibition at Tate Britain, “The Impressionists in London:  French Artists in Exile 1870-1904,” (through May 7, 2018) features a great deal of work by James Tissot, including some never before displayed in public, as well as a horrified letter he wrote to an English aristocrat describing executions he witnessed.  While visitors are even now crowding around these items, many reviewers tore into Tissot in the days before the show opened.

“How I despise the obsequies and sneers of James Tissot, his meringue frills and cupcake palette,” wrote the critic for London’s Evening Standard, who made no comment on Tissot’s elegant watercolor, The Wounded Soldier (c. 1870), or his May 29, 1871 watercolor of a dozen men being pushed off the ramparts outside Paris to their grisly deaths, a government massacre he witnessed.

Le premier homme tué que j’ai vu (Souvenir du siège de Paris) (The First Killed I Saw (Souvenir of the Siege of Paris)), by James Tissot.  (Courtesy of http://www.jamestissot.org)

The Telegraph’s reviewer also ignored Tissot’s extraordinary war reportage, and let him have it:  “Really, though, Tissot was a manicured and superficial fawner, with an excessive interest in flouncy, expensive women’s fashions.  As an artist, he was always too eager to please.”  He called Tissot’s work “irredeemably insincere” and “finicky,” filled with “meretricious flash and sparkle.”

The Financial Times’ art critic (the rare female) was sweet by comparison, merely lambasting Tissot’s “queasily compressed compositions” and “his easy facility and brittle surfaces.”

The Guardian’s critic termed Tissot a  “bore” – “a famous one whose work is still familiar from greetings cards and paperback covers of classic novels.”  He begrudgingly mentioned that Tissot, though an exile from French tumult, remained in London for a decade, “living in increasing affluence in St John’s Wood.”  Tissot’s affluence seems to be the lightning rod for many, while this critic also trots out the charge of plagiarism made against Tissot by his frenemies, James McNeill Whistler and Edmond de Goncourt:  “There’s a twist of Degas, a pinch from Manet, a whole subject from Whistler, all ironed flat by his noncommittal brushwork.”

Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, also called Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1871), by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.  Musée d’Orsay, Paris. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet (1657), by Rembrandt van Rijn. Penrhyn Castle, Gwynedd, Wales. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

[See Was James Tissot a Plagiarist? and

More “Plagiarists”: Tissot’s friends Manet, Degas, Whistler & Others.  To the left, Whistler with a soupçon of Rembrandt (right).]

The kiss of death from this Guardian critic?  “He has more to offer the historian of costume than the historian of art.”  But in 1869, the reviewer for L’Artiste praised this and more about Tissot’s work exhibited at the Paris Salon:  “Our industrial and artistic creations can perish, our morals and our fashions can fall into obscurity, but a picture by M. Tissot will be enough for archaeologists of the future to reconstitute our epoch.”

The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth) c.1876, by James Tissot.  Tate.

A week later, a different reviewer for The Guardian decried Tissot’s work for “how shallow and calculated some of his scenes are,” and was especially affronted that, “A woman accidentally displaying her bottom perfectly plays to Victorian sexual hypocrisy.”  Clearly, the display of this bottom was not accidental.

But not all art critics despise Tissot and his work.

On the Thames (1876), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 74.8 by 110 cm.  The Hepworth Wakefield.  Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot” by Lucy Paquette © 2012.

Time Out’s reviewer had just begun describing the Tate’s EY Exhibition for his readers, before his excitement brimmed over:  “…then you get hit with a room full of James Tissot paintings, and that’s where it gets good.  Tissot came to England to make a name for himself as a society painter, and boy did he ace it.  His paintings of parties in mansions, picnics in the garden, trysts on the Thames are lush, cool, refined and debauched.  His colours are deep and luxurious, his fabrics flowing and infinitely detailed.  This is society painting at its finest: knowing, cynical and sexy.  He’s an obscure and not particularly cool artist, but it’s such a treat to see so many of his works together.”  (To hipsters and sophisticates, most people described as “knowing, cynical and sexy” would, indeed, be considered cool.  Why not James Tissot?)

Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née, Thérèse Feuillant (1866), by James Tissot. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. (Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.)

I never have had to struggle through determined museum crowds to see a painting as I did at “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” at the Met in 2013.  The dense, semi-circular crushes before Tissot’s The Marquis and the Marquise de Miramon and their Children (1865), Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née, Thérèse Feuillant (1866), and The Circle of the Rue Royale (1868) were astounding, and deserved.  But a New York Times reviewer couldn’t resist disparaging the Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née, Thérèse Feuillant as “zealously detailed,” when that’s why it’s so wonderful.  People (including me) vied for a position close enough to examine its every exquisite detail, and the masterful brush curls of the gown’s ruffled edging.

Likewise at the Tate’s “Impressionists in London” recently, with waves of visitors flowing past, I had to anchor myself in front of Tissot’s The Wounded Soldier (1870) and his eyewitness account in watercolor, The Execution of Communards by French Government Forces at Fortifications in the Bois de Boulogne, 29 May 1871 (private collection), displayed in public for the first time.

Call James Tissot “devious,” “shifty,” “a manicured and superficial fawner,” whatever makes you feel superior to a man who’s been dead for 116 years but lives on in continued public popularity.  It’s said, “The best revenge is living well,” and Tissot, with his champagne on ice for visitors at his large private villa in the leafy suburbs of London, his hot girlfriend, and his enormous self-generated income and therefore his independence, lived better than pretty much anyone.  If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

“…there is something of the human soul in his work and that is why he is great, immense, infinite…”  

Vincent van Gogh on James Tissot, in a letter to his brother, Theo, September 24, 1880

© 2018 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

Thank you for celebrating my birthday with me, and please enjoy other posts on my blog as well as my book, The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.

If you’d like to learn more about James Tissot and his work, see this show if you can, and let me know what you think:

“The EY Exhibition: Impressionists in London, French Artists in Exile (1870 – 1904)”

November 2, 2017 – May 7, 2018

Tate Britain

Previous April Fool’s Day posts:

The Missing Tissot Nudes

Was James Tissot a Plagiarist?

Tissot and his Friends Clown Around

Happy Hour with James Tissot

Tissot’s Tiger Skin: A Prominent Prop

View my video, “The Strange Career of James Tissot” (Length:  2:33 minutes).

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).    See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

The Victorian Web, a vast resource on literature, history and culture in the age of Victoria, published this article in March, 2018:

By 1865, French painter James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836 – 1902) was earning 70,000 francs a year, and had found his entrée to aristocratic patronage with The Marquis and the Marchioness of Miramon and their children (1865, Musée d’Orsay) on the terrace of the Château de Paulhac in Auvergne.  The next year, the marquis commissioned Tissot to paint Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née Thérèse Feuillant (1866, Getty Museum, Los Angeles) in her sitting room at the château.

In 1867, while Tissot’s opulent new villa on the most fashionable of Baron Haussmann’s boulevards was under construction, he painted the president of Paris’ exclusive Jockey Club, Portrait of Eugène Coppens de Fontenay (1824 –1896), now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  He moved into his elegant house by 1868, the year he painted a hearty slice of the French aristocracy in a group portrait of an exclusive club, founded in 1852, The Circle of the Rue Royale (1868, Musée d’Orsay).  At the Salon in 1868, Tissot exhibited two oil paintings, one of which, Beating the Retreat in the Tuileries Gardens (private collection), was purchased by Napoleon III’s influential cousin, Princess Mathilde.

But after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71, and its bloody aftermath, the Paris Commune uprising in the spring of 1871, Tissot moved to London.  Within two years, he established himself in a large house in the London suburb of St. John’s Wood with a studio, a conservatory and a luxurious garden.  While British aristocrats did not purchase the French artist’s paintings, plenty of newly-wealthy industrialists sought his work as they enhanced their social status by building art collections.  Because provenance (the history of ownership) of Old Masters paintings was not always meticulously documented at this time, many new collectors – wary of fakes – concentrated on contemporary artists so they would know exactly what they were getting for their money.

William Agnew (1825 – 1910), the most influential art dealer in London, specialized in “high-class modern paintings” and represented Tissot for a time during the 1870s.  Tissot’s The Last Evening was purchased from Agnew’s by Charles Gassiot (1826 – 1902), a London wine merchant and art patron who lived in a mansion in Upper Tooting, Surrey.  Gassiot bought The Last Evening in February, 1873, before it was exhibited at the Royal Academy, for £1,000.  Gassiot also purchased Tissot’s Too Early, from Agnew’s in March, 1873 (before its exhibition at the Royal Academy that year), for £1,155.  Gassiot and his wife Georgiana, a childless couple, donated a number of his paintings, including The Last Evening and Too Early, to the Guildhall Art Gallery from 1895 to 1902.

A Visit to the Yacht (c. 1873), by James Tissot. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Tissot sold La Visite au Navire (A Visit to the Yacht, private collection) to Agnew’s, London, in mid-June 1873.  Less than five months later, at the beginning of November, Agnew’s, Liverpool sold the painting to art collector David Jardine (c. 1826 – 1911) of Highlea, Beaconsfield Road, Woolton.  Jardine, a timber broker and ship owner, was the head of Farnworth & Jardine, world famous for their mahogany auctions; a man of considerable ability and courtesy, he was well liked for his “courtly bearing.”

Les Adieux (Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, U.K.) was reproduced as a steel engraving by John Ballin and published by Pilgeram and Lefèvre in 1873 – an indication of its popularity.  The picture was owned by wealthy international railway contractor Charles Waring (c. 1827 – 1887).

The Ball on Shipboard (c. 1874, Tate) was purchased from Tissot by William Agnew the year it was completed and sold to Hilton Philipson (1834 – 1904), a solicitor and colliery owner living at Tynemouth.  (Philipson also spent 620 guineas at Agnew’s for John Everett Millais’ 1874 painting, The Picture of Health, a portrait of Millais’ daughter, Alice (later Mrs. Charles Stuart Wortley).

The Empress Eugénie and the Prince Impérial in the Grounds at Camden Place, Chislehurst (c. 1874), by James Tissot.

In 1874, two of James Tissot’s paintings were purchased by aristocrats, one Irish and the other French.  Mervyn Wingfield, 7th Viscount Powerscourt (1836 – 1904), whose forebears had lived since 1300 on a magnificent estate outside Enniskerry, County Wicklow, Ireland, paid £1,000 for Avant le Départ (private collection).  By autumn, Tissot was commissioned to paint a double portrait of the exiled Empress of France, widow of Napoléon III, Eugénie de Montijo (1826 –1920), and their son, The Empress Eugénie and the Prince Impérial in the Grounds at Camden Place, Chislehurst (c. 1874, Musée Nationale du Château de Compiègne, France).  However, these sales were anomalies, and his clients continued to be industrialists.

The Convalescent (1875/1876), by James Tissot.  Museums Sheffield, U.K.

Kaye Knowles, Esq. (1835-1886), was a London banker whose vast wealth came from shares in his family’s Lancashire coal mining business, Andrew Knowles and Sons.  Knowles, a client of London art dealer Algernon Moses Marsden [1848-1920, see Who was Algernon Moses Marsden?], owned a large art collection, including works by Sir Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Rosa Bonheur, Giuseppe De Nittis, Atkinson Grimshaw and Édouard Detaille.  He eventually owned four oil paintings by James Tissot, including The Empress Eugénie and the Prince Impérial in the Grounds at Camden Place, Chislehurst; On the Thames (1876, The Hepworth Wakefield, U.K.); and In the Conservatory (also known as Rivals, c. 1875-1876, Private Collection).  Incidentally, after Knowles’ sudden death, In the Conservatory (Rivals) was sold with his estate as Afternoon Tea by Christie’s, London, on May 14, 1887.  William Agnew bought the painting at this sale for 50 guineas and passed it to one of Kaye’s executors, his brother, Andrew Knowles, on May 16, 1887.  Andrew Knowles also owned The Convalescent (1875/1876, Museums Sheffield, U.K.), which was exhibited at the 1876 Royal Academy exhibition.

Chrysanthemums (c. 1874-76), by James Tissot.  Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute at Williamstown, Massachusetts

Chrysanthemums (c. 1874-76, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute at Williamstown, Massachusetts) was purchased by British cotton magnate, MP and contemporary art collector Edward Hermon (1822 – 1881) by 1877.  Hermon eventually owned over 70 paintings, including works by J.M.W. Turner, Sir Edwin Landseer, and John Everett Millais, which he displayed in the picture gallery of his magnificent French Gothic estate, Wyfold Court, built at Rotherfield Peppard, Oxfordshire between 1872 and 1878.

Portsmouth Dockyard (c. 1877, Tate) originally was owned by Henry Jump (1820 – 1893), a wealthy Justice of the Peace and corn merchant living at Gateacre, Lancashire.

Portrait of Mrs Catherine Smith Gill and Two of her Children (1877), by James Tissot.  Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, U.K.

Mr. Chapple Gill (c.1833 – 1901/2), was the son of Robert Gill, a Liverpool cotton broker of Knotty Cross and R. & C. Gill; the son joined the business in 1857 and had risen to senior partner [by 1880, he became head of the firm].  In 1877, he commissioned French painter Tissot, then living in London, to paint a portrait of his wife, Catherine Smith Carey (1847-1916), whom he had married on June 10, 1868 at Childwall.  She was the only child of Thomas Carey (1809 – c. 1875), a wealthy, retired estate agent.  Tissot’s portrait of Catherine Smith Gill (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) shows her – heiress at age 30 – sitting with her two children in the drawing-room window of her mother’s home at Lower Lee, at Woolton near Liverpool, which was built by Catherine’s father.

William Menelaus (1818 – 1882) was a Scottish-born engineer, iron and steel manufacturer, and inventor. Widowed after only ten weeks of marriage, he never remarried but raised two nephews (William Darling, who became a law lord, and Charles Darling, who became an MP and later a baron). Menelaus earned a fortune at the Dowlais Ironworks in South Wales, and his only extravagance was his art collection, which was said to fill his home in Merthyr. He donated pieces to the Cardiff Free Library, then upon his death, bequeathed to it the remaining thirty-six paintings, valued at £10,000. His bequest included James Tissot’s Bad News (The Parting), 1872, now at the National Museum Cardiff.

Quiet (c. 1881), by James Tissot.  Private Collection.

Quiet (c. 1881) was purchased by Richard Donkin, M.P. (1836 – 1919), an English shipowner who was elected Member of Parliament for the newly created constituency of Tynemouth in the 1885 general election.  The small painting remained in the family and was a major discovery of a Tissot work when it appeared on the market in 1993, selling for $ 416,220/£ 280,000.  In perfect condition, it shows Tissot’s mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton (1854 – 1882), and her niece, Lilian Hervey in the garden of Tissot’s house at 17 Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood, in north London.  It was Lilian Hervey who, in 1946, publicly identified the model long known only as “La Mystérieuse” – the Mystery Woman – as her aunt, Kathleen Newton.

The story of James Tissot’s Victorian patrons is the story of social transition:  in the late nineteenth century, art collecting ceased to be the prerogative of the aristocracy and became a status symbol for the rising industrial class.  The wealth of contemporary collectors of Tissot’s oil paintings gives an idea of the monetary value of his canvases as well as their perceived value as status symbols.

On the Thames, A Heron (c. 1871-1872), by James Tissot.  Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

An interesting side note is that, for one prominent financial dynasty, the value of Tissot’s paintings as investments did not hold.  On the Thames, A Heron (c. 1871-1872, Minneapolis Institute of Arts) was one of Tissot’s first paintings after his arrival in London – and it was the first on record to be sold at auction in England.  Calculated to appeal to Victorian tastes, this Japanese-influenced scene initially was owned by London banker José de Murrieta (c. 1834 – 1901), a member of a Spanish family who had made their fortune within two generations by trading, especially with Argentina.  Murrieta tried to sell the painting in May, 1873 as On the Thames: the frightened heron for 570 guineas, but it did not find a buyer.  José, who was married, lived at Wadhurst Park in East Sussex, designed by E.J. Tarver in 1872-75.  It was purchased by his bachelor brothers Cristobal (1839 – 1891) and Adriano (1843 – 1891); they resided in the mansion they built about 1854 at 11, Kensington Palace Gardens (which was decorated by Alfred Stevens, with Walter Crane painting a frieze in the ballroom they added in 1873).  José and his intelligent and witty wife, Jesusa (c.1834 – 1898), were members of the Prince of Wales’ set and entertained lavishly at the houses in London and Sussex, both showcases for the vast collection of modern British and Continental painting they  had amassed.  The Prince scandalized the Foreign Office before and after his trip to India by traveling to Menton on the Mediterranean for Easter with Mrs. Murrieta in March 1875, and spending three days sightseeing with her in April, 1876, while he stayed at lodgings taken for him under an assumed name.  José soon received royal favor himself, being created the first Marques de Santurce in October 1877 by 20-year-old King Alfonso XII of Spain.  Meanwhile, Lillie Langtry, a young married beauty from Jersey, consumed the Prince’s interest from mid-1877, and it was rumored that the Murrietas created a love nest for the Prince and her at Wadhurst.  The Prince’s attentions wandered by mid-1880, but by 1881, another wing had been added to Wadhurst to entertain him.  Within two years, the art collection was expendable.  In April 1883, among other paintings including a Turner and several Alma-Tademas, José offered At the Rifle Range (1869, Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire) for sale at Christie’s, London as The Crack Shot; at £220.10s, it failed to find a buyer. In June 1883, José attempted and failed to sell On the Thames for 273 guineas. The Murrietas, who invested heavily in Argentinian railways, were bankrupted in 1890, when Argentina defaulted on bond payments.

Afternoon Tea, by James Tissot.  Private Collection.

Had José de Murrieta known that London wine merchant Charles Gassiot purchased The Last Evening in February, 1873 for £1,000 and Too Early in March, 1873 for £1,155, perhaps he might have been able to sell him On the Thames: the frightened heron for 570 guineas in May, 1873.  The Spanish banker might have been prudent to have tried slipping his “high-class modern paintings” past William Agnew’s discerning taste; then again, Agnew snapped up Afternoon Tea at Christie’s in 1887 for a mere 50 guineas.  In 2013, this picture was deaccessioned [regrettably] by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York – selling at Christie’s, New York to a private collector for $1,700,000 (Hammer price).]

©  2018 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

My thanks to The Victorian Web‘s Editor-in-Chief and Webmaster, George Landow, and to Associate Editor Jackie Banerjee.

Selected Bibliography

Brooke, David S. “James Tissot and the ‘Ravissante Irlandaise.'” Connoisseur. May 1968.

Graves, Algernon, F.S.A. Art Sales from Early in the Eighteenth Century to Early in the Twentieth Century. London: Algernon Graves, 1918.

Misfeldt, Willard E. James Jacques Joseph Tissot: A Bio-Critical Study. Ph.D. diss. Ann Arbor: Washington University, 1971.

Paquette, Lucy. “Who was Algernon Moses Marsden?” The Hammock. Web. 26 March 2018.

Ridley, Jane. The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, The Playboy Prince. New York: Random House, 2013.

Wadhurst History Society Newsletter. Web. 26 March 2018.

See my other articles on The Victorian Web:

A James Tissot Chronology, by Lucy Paquette for The Victorian Web

James Tissot (1836-1902): a brief biography by Lucy Paquette for The Victorian Web

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).    See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

In 1866, thirty-year-old painter James Tissot bought land to build a villa on the most prestigious of Baron Haussmann’s grand new boulevards, the eleven-year-old avenue de l’Impératrice (now avenue Foch). By the Salon of 1868, Tissot had occupied his newly built mansion:  the intriguing details in La Cheminée (The Fireplace, c. 1869, private collection) and L’escalier (The Staircase, 1869, private collection) almost certainly were painted from its opulent interior.

Tissot’s studio, a showcase for his renowned collection of Japanese art, became a landmark to see when touring Paris – and, for Tissot, it was a brilliant marketing tool to attract commissions.  His collection of Japanese art and objets had grown to include a model of a Japanese ship, a Chinese shrine and hardwood table, and a Japanese black lacquered household altar, along with dozens of embroidered silk kimonos, Japanese dolls, folding screens and porcelains.  In 1869, he assimilated these exotic items into elegant compositions in three similar paintings featuring young women looking at Japanese objects.  

Jeunes femmes regardant des objects japonais (1869), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 24 by 19 in. (60.96 by 48.26 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

Young ladies admiring Japanese objects (1869), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 22 by 15 in. (55.88 by 38.10 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

By the 1930s, the version below was hanging in an interior decorator’s store on Third Street in Cincinnati and was purchased by Dr. Henry M. Goodyear; he and his wife gifted Tissot’s picture to the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1984.

I recently made a trip to Cincinnati specifically to see this painting.  The Cincinnati Art Museum is beautiful, has an impressive collection, and is vibrant and extremely popular.  It is one of the oldest art museums in the United States.  Following the success of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, when public art museums were a new phenomenon, the Women’s Art Museum Association was organized in Cincinnati, and the Cincinnati Museum Association was incorporated by 1881.  Five years later, a permanent art museum building was completed – the first purpose-built art museum west of the Alleghenies, heralded worldwide as “The Art Palace of the West.”  It has greatly expanded since then.

Young Women Looking at Japanese Articles is just exquisite – painted in Tissot’s academic style in a rich palette, it has a glossy, enameled finish and features abundant exotic details.  The women’s faces are sweet and contemplative, and their costumes are lovely.  You’ll notice that the central figure’s ensemble is actually red, not brown, as indicated in most photographs of this work.

Young Women Looking at Japanese Articles (1869), by James Jacques Joseph Tissot. Oil on canvas, 70.5 x 50.2 cm. Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, USA; Gift of Henry M. Goodyear, M.D. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot,” by Lucy Paquette © 2012

It is such an engaging work that I took well over a dozen close-ups for you to enjoy.

Related posts:

“The three wonders of the world”: Tissot’s japonisme,1864-67

“Chi-so”: Tissot teaches a brother of Japan’s last Shogun, 1868

James Tissot’s brilliant marketing tool, 1869

Tissot’s Study for “Young Women looking at Japanese Objects” (1869)

Tissot in the U.S.: The Midwest

Tissot’s Comeback in the 1930s

© 2018 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).    See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

There is very little documentation on James Tissot’s personality, behavior, and habits, including his interaction with the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  We can only extrapolate their relationships based on a few known facts.

Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation, 1849-50), by D. G. Rossetti (Photo:  Wikipedia.org)

The leading members of the P.R.B., all ambitious art students in their early 20s, were William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), and John Everett Millais (1829–1896), and the rebellious aim of their secret society was to create a new British art.  Rather than paint mannered historical or dull genre scenes, they wanted to return to the sincerity, minute detail, and luminous palette of medieval and early Renaissance painting.  They began with an attempt to revive religious art but quickly resorted to literary subject matter.

The first P.R.B. works appeared at the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1849, when James Tissot (1836 – 1902) was 13 years old.  In six years, he moved to Paris, and became an Academically-trained painter, favoring medieval subjects.  He was greatly influenced by the work of the Belgian painter Hendrik Leys (1815 – 1869).  Leys’ painting, The Trental Mass of Berthal de Haze – replete with numerous characters enacting a medieval drama against a minutely-detailed architectural background – won a gold medal at the 1855 Paris International Exhibition.

A Walk in the Snow, by James Tissot

In 1862, Tissot traveled to London, where the first exhibition of his work was not at the Royal Academy but the International Exhibition.  Tissot showed one of his début paintings from the 1859 Salon, giving his medieval picture the English title, A Walk in the Snow.

He also must have met Britain’s most popular painter, John Everett Millais, who had moved to London with his wife, Effie.  With their growing family to provide for, Millais found a steady source of income drawing illustrations, for periodicals such as Once a Week and The Cornhill Magazine as well as Tennyson’s Poems (1857) and Anthony Trollope’s novel Framley Parsonage (1860).

At the 1862 London International Exhibition, the retired first British Minister to Japan, Sir Rutherford Alcock (1809-1897) showed his collection at his Japanese Pavilion.  It was a sensation.  With the signing of the first commercial treaty between Japan and America in 1854, more than 200 years of Japanese seclusion came to an end.   In Paris, a host of import shops cropped up, and like Alcock, those with the means could collect exotic treasures – handcrafted pottery, lacquer, bamboo and ivory – that seemed even more exquisite compared to the Industrial Revolution’s mass-produced wares.

Young Women Looking at Japanese Articles (1869), by James Tissot.  (Image Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library)

Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who lived in Chelsea near James McNeill Whistler, tried to shop for Japanese items in Paris in November, 1864.  But, as he wrote to his mother from Paris, he “found all the costumes were being snapped up by a French artist, Tissot, who it seems is doing three Japanese pictures, which the mistress of the shop described to me as the three wonders of the world, evidently in her opinion quite throwing Whistler into the shade.”

Rossetti’s comment indicates that James Tissot was unknown to him prior to this, and that, with resentment at losing out on these treasures to him, he imagined Tissot was an inferior artist.

However, Rossetti became an admirer of Tissot’s work within months, when a book was published that included illustrations by several artists, including Millais and Tissot.  On February 3, 1865, Rossetti wrote to his friend, Alexander Macmillan, “I have seen the frontispiece & vignette to Tom Taylor’s Breton Ballads [Ballads and Songs of Brittany] designed by Tissot, which are admirable things. Could you as their publisher let me have a proof of each separate from the work?”  Macmillan made Rossetti a gift of one of Tissot’s drawings, either The Crusader’s Wife  or the one for the frontispiece.

Apple Blossoms (Spring, 1859), J.E. Millais. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Spring (1865), by James Tissot. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

Tissot continued to be inspired by Millais.  At the Paris Salon of 1865, though one of Tissot’s medieval pictures was a disappointment to the critics, his second picture, Spring,  received some praise because of its similarities to Millais’ Apple Blossoms (Spring), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859.

Portrait of Effie Millais (1873), by J.E. Millais (Photo:  Wiki)

In early June, 1871, Tissot fled Paris, along with thousands of others, after the Bloody Week, when French government troops brutally suppressed the Commune uprising that followed the Franco-Prussian War.  He arrived in London with 100 francs in his pocket, but he had had enough time to pack a few drawings before he left Paris:  on June 19, 1871, he dedicated an exquisite graphite rendering of a reclining French soldier at his ease with a rifle to Effie Millais (1828 – 1897).  Tissot had fought bravely in the Battle of Malmaison, west of Paris, on October 21, 1870; this drawing is inscribed to Effie, “a la Malmaison/le 22 Oct 1870.”

With the help of a handful of friends, including Millais, Tissot proceeded to rebuild his career in London.

A Huguenot, on St Bartholomew’s Day, refusing to shield himself from danger by wearing the Roman Catholic badge (1851-52), by J.E. Millais.  (Photo:  Wiki)

Les Adieux (The Farewells, 1871), by James Tissot. (Photo courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library)

At the Royal Academy exhibition in 1872, Tissot showed Les Adieux (The Farewells, 1871).  A sentimental costume piece calculated to appeal to the British public, it clearly was inspired by Millais’ A Huguenot (1851-52).  Neither the critics nor the public objected to the French artist’s emulation of a Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece; rather, Tissot’s painting was so popular that it was reproduced as a steel engraving by John Ballin and published by Pilgeram and Lefèvre in 1873.

The Hammock (1879), by James Tissot.  (Image courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library)

Later in the decade, when Tissot ceased exhibiting his work at the Royal Academy and instead displayed it at the innovative, elegant new Grosvenor Gallery, his supreme talent was acknowledged, but his paintings were considered a perversion of Pre-Raphaelitism:

“Mr. James Tissot, one of the eccentrics of the Grosvenor school, has sent in eight pictures.  In six or seven of them the leading figure is a girl in a hammock or in a swing, or lying down.  She is always surrounded by green trees and green grass, so green that you have to hunt for the figures, and so clever that you want to have Mr. Tissot sent for that you may call him names for prostituting his talents to a silly affectation of realism.   Pre-Raphaelitism gone mad is the motive power of this wild man of the studio.  Whistler has not quite satisfied us whether he can paint or not; but under Tissot’s eccentricities lurks a laughing giant.”   The New York Times, May 12, 1879

Pan and Psyche (1872-74), by Edward Burne-Jones.  (Photo:  Wikimedia.org)

In an 1896 letter to Helen (May) Gaskell, Edward Burne-Jones (1833 – 1898), who had been a close follower of Rossetti, described Tissot’s paintings of “ladies in hammocks, showing legs & ladies smoking – and all manner of things not tending to edification.”  Burne-Jones had met and fell in love with May, an unhappily married Society hostess, in 1892.

Burne-Jones’ wife of thirty-eight years, Georgiana (1840 – 1920), wrote to Tissot after her husband’s death, asking if they had ever met or if there had ever been any correspondence between the two artists.  In January, 1899, she received a letter from him with a “beautiful answer” to her questions:

Georgiana Burne-Jones, c. 1882.  (Photo:  Wikimedia)

“I am back from America and upon my return I find your letter which I hasten to answer. I did not know your husband very well.  I only remember that around 1875 I went to see him; he received me with great simplicity, and I judged the man according to what I saw in his studio – that is, great things on the easel rendered with a touching primitive simplicity.  I felt the heights where he hovered and the materiality where I struggled more and more; all this intimidated me so much that I was not going to see him anymore. He grew so much and I left England. Since then I have made this Life of Christ, I know he has been to see it.  I knew he liked it, and I would have a really good time seeing him on one of my trips to London when I learned of his death. He never wrote to me, otherwise I would put at your disposal what would remain of this great artist, one of the purest glories of your country. ”

Tissot, one of the most self-confident, ambitious and materially successful artists of his time, offered these effusive sentiments to a widow tasked with writing her husband’s biography.

The Finding of the Savior in the Temple (1854–60), by William Holman Hunt.  (Photo:  Wikimedia.org)

As for the third leading founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, William Holman-Hunt wrote in his memoir, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Vol. II:

The Franco-German war had brought many French artists to England, some of whom had returned to Paris, while others remained here.  One evening at a small bachelors’ gathering at Millais’ studio, a foreigner, being told that I had just returned from Jerusalem, asked if I were Holman-Hunt, the painter of “The Finding of Christ in the Temple” [1854-55], which he had lately seen in Mr. Charles Mathews’ collection. He said that he had admired it and my principle of work so much that he had resolved some day to go to the East and paint on the same system.  I then learnt that this artist was young Tissot.

The Youth of Jesus (1886-94), by James Tissot.  (Photo:  Wikiart.org)

Either this is true, and “young Tissot,” finding himself rebuilding his reputation in London at age 35, taking career cues from the practical, businesslike Millais, dreamed of imitating Holman-Hunt’s artistic quest in the Holy Land – or, more likely, Holman-Hunt as an elderly man was burnishing his reputation by taking credit for inspiring Tissot’s highly lucrative Bible illustrations, researched in Palestine after a “spiritual awakening” in 1885 and published to worldwide acclaim in 1896 and 1897.  Tissot’s series of 365 gouache illustrations for the Life of Christ were shown to wildly enthusiastic crowds in Paris (1894 and 1895), London (1896) and New York (1898), after which they toured North America until 1900, bringing in $100,000 in entrance fees; the Brooklyn Museum then acquired them by public subscription for $60,000.  After Tissot’s death in 1902, his assistants completed his Old Testament project, which was published in 1904.  Holman-Hunt published his autobiography in 1905.

And so, from James Tissot’s earliest years as a painter until his death, the Pre-Raphaelites were intertwined with him and his success.

© 2018 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

Related Posts:

London Début: Tissot explores a new art market, 1862

Ready and waiting: Tissot’s entrée, 1865

The competition: Tissot’s friends Whistler, Degas, Manet, Courbet, Alma-Tadema & Millais in 1866

Welcome to the Royal Academy Exhibition: London, 1870 (Part I)

London, June 1871

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).

See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

NOTE:  If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

French painter James Tissot emigrated from Paris to London in mid-1871, in the chaos after the Franco-Prussian War and bloody Commune, and became successful in Victorian England within a few years.   In 1873, he sold Too Early through London art dealer William Agnew (1825 – 1910) – who specialized in “high-class modern paintings” – for 1,050 guineas.  Agnew purchased The Ball on Shipboard from Tissot the following year, and in 1875, purchased Hush! directly from the wall of the Royal Academy by for 1,200 guineas.

What made Tissot’s paintings “modern”?  How were his pictures of everyday life different from those painted by his English contemporaries?

James Tissot (1836 – 1902), an astute businessman keenly aware of buyers’ preferences, painted many subjects that his English contemporaries did.  But while Victorian painters like George Dunlop Leslie (1835 – 1921) depicted genteel women behaving well – docile and proper – Tissot was a bit daring.  Like others, he also painted a woman (his mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton) reading – but his model is a bit of a rebel, wearing eye makeup and a gown with a revealing neckline, improper as a day dress.  In Her Favorite Pastime, Leslie presents us with a straightforward rendering of a pretty and sedate woman focused on her book.  In Tissot’s Quiet, Kathleen is sitting – quite indecorously – with her legs crossed, somewhat slumped forward, against a racy leopard skin.  Yet, the image is of a loving mother, the exhausted girl leaning lovingly against her, and the resting dog underscores the domesticity of the scene while the expansive green lawn behind them indicates the wealth of the household.

Left:  Her Favorite Pastime (1864), by George Dunlop Leslie

Right:  Quiet (c. 1881), by James Tissot

While his English contemporaries depicted the ideal of contented domestic life, with family members often in stiffly posed compositions, Tissot’s showed a casual reality.  George Goodwin Kilburne’s The Piano Lesson relies on the single child obediently taking instruction and a symmetrical composition to show us the orderliness of this family’s conduct.  In Kathleen Newton at the Piano, Tissot gives us a peek behind the curtain dividing the formal front parlor from the informal room behind, where Kathleen, her two children, and an older niece huddle affectionately near her as she plays for them.

Left:  The Piano Lesson (1871), by George Goodwin Kilburne

Right:  Kathleen Newton at the Piano (c. 1881), by James Tissot

In A Mother’s Darling, Kilburne depicts the girl as a little woman; in The Garden Bench, Kathleen Newton’s son, daughter and niece are children behaving spontaneously.

Left:  A Mother’s Darling (1869), by George Goodwin Kilburne

Right:  The Garden Bench (c. 1882), by James Tissot

The four pictures of afternoon tea below, two by Leslie and two by Tissot, illustrate Leslie’s literal manner and Tissot’s rather racy take on this British ritual.  While Leslie’s lone ladies are being served by a housemaid and dreaming wistfully into the distance, Tissot’s social beings are using the occasion to flirt and sum up available suitors.

Left:  Afternoon Tea (1865), by George Dunlop Leslie

Right:  In the Conservatory (Rivals, c. 1875), by James Tissot

Left:  Five o’Clock Tea (c. 1874), by George Dunlop Leslie

Right:  The Rivals (I rivali, 1878–79), by James Tissot

Below, in Alice in Wonderland, Leslie depicts an iconic family moment as a mother stimulates the imagination of her daughter by reading aloud to her on a stiff sofa, attired in a proper day dress with a bustle.  The girl, in her tidy dress, apron and black stockings, has set aside her doll to listen, her dreamy face against her mother’s bosom showing the effect of the story on her imagination.  In Reading a Story, Tissot depicts a similar scene in a natural setting, with a mother (Kathleen Newton) informally flipping pages on a comfortably-padded garden bench with a little girl who, though engaged, looks a bit fidgety as well as windblown from outdoor play.

Left:  Alice in Wonderland (1879), by George Dunlop Leslie

Right:  Reading a Story (c. 1878-79), by James Tissot

Tissot did not portray Victorian poverty, or even attempt to document the reality of the era’s social ills.  In the images below, Philip Hermogenes Calderon (1833 – 1898) and George Adolphus Storey (1834 – 1919) depict destitute orphans in an attempt at realism colored with sentimentality.  Tissot’s upper-class orphan, accompanied by the expensively-dressed woman modeled by Kathleen Newton, is somber, but sentimental in an essentially decorative way.

Above left:  Orphans (1870), by Philip Hermogenes Calderon

Above right:  L’Orpheline (1879), by James Tissot

Right:  Orphans (1879), by George Adolphus Storey

The pictures below perfectly capture the difference between Tissot’s “modern” paintings and those of his Victorian peers.

Above left:  Considering a Reply (c. 1860), by George Dunlop Leslie

Above right:  The Letter (c. 1878), by James Tissot

Right:  Reading the Letter (1885), by Thomas Benjamin Kennington

While Thomas Benjamin Kennington (1856 – 1916) depicts a woman reading a letter, and George Dunlop Leslie shows us a woman who has read a letter and now must consider how to reply, Tissot gives us a woman who, having read her letter, rips it to shreds that billow away in the wind.  Kennington’s and Dunlop’s compositions are simple, but Tissot provides an air of tantalizing mystery around his subject:  the woman stalks toward us through an elegant, landscaped garden while the remnants of her luncheon, or tea, are being cleared by a footman.  Who is she?  We are drawn into her drama, and are all the more curious about the contents of her letter.

James Tissot, unlike his Victorian peers, did not portray women gathering flowers or gazing at themselves in a mirror, or brides, or women sewing or dancing.

But for a cozy scene of a Victorian lady  minding her children, he gave us Hide and Seek (left, c. 1877), in which Kathleen Newton lounges in an upholstered armchair, absorbed in a newspaper in a corner of his opulent studio while her children and those of her sister scamper about.

While Tissot used the brighter palette of the Impressionists in France, his perspective can be ascribed to his nationality only partially:  his subject matter and his innate humor were unique.

Related posts:

The Stars of Victorian Painting: Auction Prices

Victorians on the Move, by James Tissot

The James Tissot Tour of Victorian England

French Painter James Tissot’s British Clients: Rising Industrialists, by Lucy Paquette for The Victorian Web

James Tissot and the Pre-Raphaelites

James Tissot’s Model and Muse, Kathleen Newton

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).    See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYV

French painter James Tissot’s success in England from 1871 to 1882 inspired at least one English artist:  John Atkinson Grimshaw.  Grimshaw, who like Tissot was born in 1836, now is best known for his glowing Victorian moonlight scenes.

Whitby Harbour by Moonlight (1867), by John Atkinson Grimshaw.  (Photo:  Wikiart)

John Atkinson Grimshaw (Photo:  Wikipedia)

But self-taught, Grimshaw began with still lifes influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, which he started exhibiting in his birthplace, the industrial city of Leeds, in the 1860s.  He had become a clerk at the Great Northern Railway at age 16, married in 1858 at age 22, and, after painting from nature in the parks and fields outside the city for a few years, began to sell his paintings in Leeds.  His work became popular in the area, and he gave up his job at age 25.  He began exhibiting his work in 1862, and in 1865, moved his growing family to Knostrop Hall, a Jacobean manor house [demolished in 1960] two miles east of Leeds Tissot on the Aire River.

By the 1870s, Grimshaw’s work was being promoted by London art dealer William Agnew.  He painted his first moonlight scene, Whitby Harbour by Moonlight, in 1867, but in search of new subjects to appeal to collectors as his reputation spread to the capital, he began imitating the work of other artists, including Dutch-born Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836 –1912) and James Tissot, both of whom recently had emigrated to London and had found spectacular success.

Tissot’s Too Early was a sensation at the Royal Academy in 1873, and it was purchased and sold by William Agnew.  Grimshaw made his debut at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1874 with the acceptance of The Lady of the Lea, and around 1875, his paintings were exhibited regularly at Agnew’s prestigious galleries.  His work sold well, to the same type of wealthy industrialists who purchased Tissot’s paintings.

The Fan (1875), by James Tissot.

Il Penseroso (1875), by John Atkinson Grimshaw.

Here are some examples of Grimshaw’s paintings inspired by Tissot’s style, subject matter, composition, and in some cases, his palette.

Above left, The Japanese Scroll (c. 1874), by James Tissot; right, Spring (1875), by John Atkinson Grimshaw.  Grimshaw’s fashionable lady relaxes near a large window overlooking a serene private garden; as in Tissot’s picture, the elegant interior features the Oriental bric-à-brac so stylish during this period.

Above left, Young Women looking at Japanese articles (1869), by James Tissot; right, Summer (1875), by John Atkinson Grimshaw.  Grimshaw showcases the lady’s bustle, à la Tissot, in an affluent home filled with Oriental items.

Above left, In an English Garden (1878), by James Tissot; right, In the Pleasaunce (1875), by John Atkinson Grimshaw.  Tissot’s scene was painted in his garden in St. John’s Wood, London, and Grimshaw’s was painted at “Ye Old Hall/Knostrop, Leeds.”  The compositions of both scenes rely on the well-dressed women as focal points in the elaborate settings.

Above, left, The Empress Eugénie and the Prince Impérial in the Grounds at Camden Place, Chislehurst (c. 1874), by James Tissot; right, Autumn Regrets (1882), by John Atkinson Grimshaw.  Grimshaw, taking a cue from Tissot, uses weather and the season to convey mood in his melancholy outdoor scene.

In 1876, at the height of his career, Grimshaw bought a second home, Castle-by-the-Sea, in the resort town of Scarborough, and he moved there with his family.  But three years later, when a friend reneged on a substantial loan, Grimshaw, as guarantor, found himself in debt.  The house in Scarborough was sold, the family returned to Knostrop Hall, and in 1880, Grimshaw rented a studio in Chelsea, London, where he could focus on his work and accelerate his production of pictures.

After Tissot’s young mistress died in 1882, and he immediately returned to Paris, Grimshaw was mainly painting the moonlight scenes that proved popular, and even were admired by James McNeill Whistler, who said, “I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlit pictures.”  Grimshaw died in 1893, known for his moonlit landscapes; Tissot died in 1902, famous at that time for his Bible illustrations.

Related posts:

James Tissot and Alfred Stevens

What became of James Tissot and Alfred Stevens?

Was James Tissot a Plagiarist?

More “Plagiarists”: Tissot’s friends Manet, Degas, Whistler & Others

© 2018 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).

See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

NOTE:  If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

I’ve just been to New York for Tea, the only painting by James Tissot on display in the city – and the state.

Tea (1872), oil on wood, 26 by 18 7/8 in. (66 by 47.9 cm), was one of Tissot’s eighteenth-century paintings calculated to appeal to British collectors once he had moved to London in mid-1871, following the Franco-Prussian War and its bloody aftermath, the Paris Commune.

Tissot’s great friend, Edgar Degas, owned a pencil study for Tea. 

Tea is a version of another of Tissot’s oils from 1872, Bad News (The Parting), now in the collection of the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.

Bad News (The Parting), 1872, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

Tea was in a private collection in Rome, Italy in 1968.  It was with Somerville & Simpson, Ltd., London, by 1979-81, when it was consigned to Mathiessen Fine Art Ltd., London.  The painting was purchased from Mathiessen by Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, New York.

Charles B. Wrightsman (1895–1986), president of Standard Oil of Kansas and a tournament polo player, married his second wife, Jayne Larkin (b. 1919) from Flint, Michigan, in 1944.  The couple began collecting fine art in 1952, and Mr. Wrightsman was elected to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees in 1956.  In 1961, the Wrightsmans’ collection was described by The New York Times as “one of the most important private collections in the world.”

Socialite, philanthropist and fine arts collector Mrs. Charles Wrightsman was elected to the Met’s Board of Trustees in 1975.  Upon Mr. Wrightsman’s death in 1986, the collection became her sole property.

Mrs. Wrightsman owned Tea until 1998, when she gifted it, and eventually three other Tissot oil paintings, to the Met.

Though the Met’s collection included these four Tissot oils between 2006 and 2013, none was displayed.

En plein soleil (In the Sunshine, c. 1881) was purchased in 1983 by Mr. and Mrs. Wrightsman.  Mrs. Wrightsman kept the picture until 2006, when she gifted it to the Met.

Spring Morning (c. 1875) was purchased in 1981, as Matinée de printemps, by Mr. and Mrs. Wrightsman.  Mrs. Wrightsman gifted it to the Met in 2009.

In the Conservatory (Rivals) was purchased by the Wrightsmans in 1981.  Mrs. Wrightsman gifted Rivals to the Met in 2009.  Inexplicably, this major work among the Tissot oils donated to the Met by Mrs. Wrightsman was deaccessioned in 2013.

When I wrote, “New York, New York!  It has everything – except paintings by James Tissot that you can see,” in Tissot in the U.S.:  New York (December 10, 2013), the Met still was exhibiting none of its Tissots.  Tea was put on display in 2014.

Tea (1872), by James Tissot.  Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.  (Photo:  R. Zuercher)

Tea includes Tissot’s beautiful and deftly painted surfaces:  the wood table, silver tea service, porcelain, the flocked fabric of the woman’s gown and her black lace mitts.  Here are some close-ups from my visit for you to enjoy!

Tea (1872), by James Tissot. Oil on wood, 26 x 18 7/8 in. (66 x 47.9 cm.). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access

Here are more details, from the Met’s Open Access image, above, in which you can see how Tissot painted reflections, shadows, and details in the distance:

Below, you can compare Tea and the left side of Bad News (The Parting).  While at first glance they look identical, there are many differences:  the position of the wooden blinds, the scenes outside the windows, the shapes of the silver trays, the coffeepots, and the urns, the placement of the cakes and the chairs, and the style of the wooden tables.  As always with Tissot’s oil paintings, there is more than meets the eye.
                     

Related posts:

Tissot in the U.S.:  New York

For sale: In the Conservatory (Rivals), c. 1875, by James Tissot

A spotlight on Tissot at the Met’s “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity”

© 2018 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).

See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

NOTE:  If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot was published in October, 2012, and I began this blog, The Hammock, in September of that year.

In these past six years, French painter James Tissot and his work have become increasingly familiar to the public.

I have publicized my novel and my blog on the Internet and social media, engaging with a worldwide audience. Though the majority of my readers are from the United Kingdom, the United States, and France, I am amazed at the tally of countries showing up on my blog readership daily, from Ecuador to Estonia, Iceland to Zimbabwe, Monaco to Nepal.

Readers in the United Kingdom and France are more aware of Tissot and his work, mainly because more of his paintings are on display in public collections in those countries.

Many people elsewhere tell me they had never heard of Tissot before, and many more that they had no idea how beautiful his paintings are. Books on James Tissot and his work can be quite expensive and are not readily available in many public libraries, or even in art museum shops.

After Tissot’s death in 1902, interest in his work declined until Victorian art regained popularity in the 1960s.

In 1968, there was a major retrospective of his work in Rhode Island and Toronto, and another in London in 1983-84. In 2015-16, there was an exhibition of his work – the first ever – in Rome (James Tissot is now in Italy!).

Recent museum exhibitions have made it possible for a wider audience to view Tissot’s work. (See Tissot in the new millenium: Museum Exhibitions, A spotlight on Tissot at the Met’s “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity”, and A spotlight on Tissot at the Tate’s “The EY Exhibition: Impressionists in London”.)

Much of Tissot’s work is privately owned (for instance, see James Tissot in the Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection). There are only ninety oil paintings by James Tissot in public art collections worldwide:  twenty-six in the U.K., two in the Republic of Ireland, twenty-three in France, one in Belgium, one in Switzerland, twenty-five in the continental U.S. and one in Puerto Rico, six in Canada, one in India, two in New Zealand, and two in Australia. Many of these pictures are not, or not often, on display, and opportunities to see them in other locations are rare. Of these ninety, I’ve viewed forty-two, as well as two in private collections.

The most recent museum acquisitions highlight Tissot’s most stunning work. The Marquis and the Marquise de Miramon and their children (1865) was acquired from the family by the Musée d’Orsay in 2006; the first time it had been exhibited anywhere else since 1866 was in the blockbuster exhibition, Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity. Click this link to an interactive image for a closer look.

The J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, California, acquired Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née, Thérèse Feuillant (1866) from the family in 2007. Tissot received permission from her husband, who had commissioned the portrait, to display it at the 1867 Paris International Exhibition, where this private image was seen by the public for the first time – the only time, until the Getty purchased it. I saw this gorgeous painting in May, 2013, when it was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity. You can click this link to an interactive image for a closer look.

In 1868, most likely due to the Marquis de Miramon, Tissot was commissioned to paint the most lucrative and elaborate painting of his career, a group portrait of the twelve members of The Circle of the Rue Royale. The members decided who would own the painting through a drawing; the winner was Baron Hottinguer, seated to the right of the sofa. The Musée d’Orsay acquired The Circle of the Rue Royale in 2011 from Baron Hottinguer’s descendants for about 4 million euros. It also was included with Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, and as with Tissot’s other two large paintings, it drew crowds. (See Tissot in the new millenium: Museum Acquisitions.)

Writing this blog is a labor of love, a way to share some of my research on James Tissot’s life and work, and is limited only by the necessity of avoiding copyrighted images. Since I began six years ago, more high resolution, Open Access images have been made available, notably through The Getty Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

My husband, who has become an informed fan of Tissot’s work, photographs me with it and often takes excellent close-ups of Tissot’s brushwork and details.

While conducting research for the blog, I’ve enjoyed a private tour of Tissot’s former home in London (now a family residence; see A visit to James Tissot’s house & Kathleen Newton’s grave), trips to the U.K. including The James Tissot Tour of Victorian England and A spotlight on Tissot at the Tate’s “The EY Exhibition: Impressionists in London”, and a tour of Paris highlighting places Tissot would have lived and visited (The James Tissot Tour of Paris). I’ve met museum curators and research librarians for private tours and discussions, and I’ve viewed stored Tissot paintings and drawings (see James Tissot’s “A Civic Procession” (c. 1879), Tissot in the U.S.: The Speed Museum, Kentucky, and Tissot’s Study for “Young Women looking at Japanese Objects” (1869)).

I’ve visited museums and galleries, large and small, in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and France, studying Tissot’s paintings, for my “A Closer Look” series, in which I share my (and my husband’s) photographs and experiences with you. Another series of articles explores Tissot’s work in various countries and regions within them; a subsequent series follows Tissot’s work and reputation in the decades between his death and the new millennium; another highlights masculine fashion in Tissot’s paintings; yet another focuses on various stages of Tissot’s work:

James Tissot’s Medieval Paintings, 1858-67

James Tissot’s Faust series, 1860-65

James Tissot’s Directoire series, 1868-71

“The three wonders of the world”: Tissot’s japonisme,1864-67

James Tissot’s Georgian Girls, c. 1872

Tissot’s La Femme à Paris series

Belle Époque Portraits in Pastel by James Tissot

I’ve collected little-known items of interest about Tissot’s works, such as the near-destruction of one of his most beautiful images, Still on Top (c. 1874), in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki  in New Zealand, in Tissot around the world: India, Japan, Australia & New Zealand, and the existence of Tissot’s Study for the family of the Marquis de Miramon (1865).

I’ve presented sales information, including For sale:  In the Conservatory (Rivals), c. 1875, by James Tissot, For sale: A Visit to the Yacht, c. 1873, by James Tissot, and Tissot in the new millennium: Oils at Auction, as well as a comparison of the market value of Tissot’s work and that of his contemporaries, in The Stars of Victorian Painting: Auction Prices. I also researched Oil paintings by James Tissot registered with the Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal (NEPIP).

In other posts, I’ve presented little-known information about Tissot himself:  Tissot’s Romances, Was Cecil Newton James Tissot’s son?, Was James Tissot a Plagiarist?, and More “Plagiarists”: Tissot’s friends Manet, Degas, Whistler & Others. You’ll find plenty of articles on Tissot’s beautiful young mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton, including James Tissot’s Model and Muse, Kathleen Newton, James Tissot Domesticated, and James Tissot in the 1940s: La Mystérieuse is identified.

And, of course, I’ve addressed The Missing Tissot Nudes!

Of my 152 posts, varying in length from about 500 to 3500 words, here are the Top Ten with the highest readership on my blog, as of October 12, 2018:

10        James Tissot’s garden idyll & Kathleen Newton’s death

9         James Tissot’s brilliant marketing tool, 1869

8         James Tissot oils at auction: Seven favorites

7        A spotlight on Tissot at the Met’s “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity”

6        “The three wonders of the world”: Tissot’s japonisme,1864-67

5        A Closer Look at Tissot’s “Too Early”

4        “The Future of French Art”: Henri Regnault (1843-1871)

3        Kathleen Newton by James Tissot: eight auctioned oil paintings

2        Tissot’s La Femme à Paris series

1        James Tissot’s house at St. John’s Wood, London

While I began my research on James Tissot in 2009, when drafting my novel, it’s been in the six years since I launched this blog that I’ve been contacted by individuals with unexpected, wonderful, documented facts to share related to James Tissot and his work, including biographical details of people he knew, information on his Paris villa, close-up photographs of some of Tissot’s works I have not been able to visit, a hot tip on an unannounced, temporary exhibition of three of his privately-owned masterpieces at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford last year, and the name of a celebrity owner* of one of his most recognizable paintings, as well as the gift of a scholarly work by a Tissot-loving museum curator I befriended through my blog. All of this spontaneous generosity is a remarkable feature of the support I’ve enjoyed.

So, a heartfelt thank you – to all of you who read my blog, and to my husband, who contributes such helpful images to it. Through it, I’ve met the loveliest people, was invited to serve as a guest blogger, a contributor to The Victorian Web, and recently was interviewed for an art podcast:

• James Tissot’s Fashion Plates (1864-1878): A Guest Post for Mimi Matthews by Lucy Paquette
• A James Tissot Chronology, by Lucy Paquette for The Victorian Web
• James Tissot (1836-1902): a brief biography by Lucy Paquette for The Victorian Web
• French Painter James Tissot’s British Clients: Rising Industrialists, by Lucy Paquette for The Victorian Web
• Click here to listen to my discussion about James Tissot’s life and art in a podcast interview with Brooke Musterman.

I have collected scholarly works on James Tissot, but they are largely biocritical studies: there is so little documentation on Tissot’s life that his work often has to speak for him. There are very few accounts of him by his contemporaries, and when his elderly, eccentric niece died in his château in eastern France in 1964, all his papers and drawings were auctioned off. My research centers on finding new information on his personality and actions, particularly during the Franco-Prussian War and Commune, using previously unconsidered primary sources. Tissot often seems to fall through the cracks of art history – as his work straddled French academic style, Realism, French Impressionism, and Victorian painting. He left France for eleven years, and while he was successful in London, he was not British. Tissot often is overlooked because he belongs to no category, really, but his own.

James Tissot has a great story that hasn’t been told, and I encourage you to read The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot. 

James Tissot’s work has proven a crowd-pleaser, in the 2012-13 show Impressionism, Fashion & Modernity; 2013’s James Tissot: Painting the Victorian Woman at The Hepworth, Wakefield, U.K.; the 2015-16 exhibition James Tissot at the Bramante Cloister inside Santa Maria della Pace Church in Rome; and 2017-18’s Impressionists in London.

The most recent retrospective of his work in North America, and the only one since the first in 1968 (in Rhode Island and Toronto), was James Tissot:  Victorian Life/Modern Love, an exhibition that began at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, in 1999, and then traveled to the Musée du Québec, Canada, and the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York. But a major retrospective of his work will be held in Paris and San Francisco in 2020. I’m looking forward to it, and I hope to be invited to contribute some of the extensive new scholarship I have to offer on James Tissot’s life and work.

[*] If you’re curious, see Celebrities & Millionaires Vie for Tissot’s Paintings in the 1990s!

©  2018 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

The articles published on this blog are copyrighted by Lucy Paquette.  An article or any portion of it may not be reproduced in any medium or transmitted in any form, electronic or mechanical, without the author’s permission.  You are welcome to cite or quote from an article provided you give full acknowledgement to the author. 

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).    See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

James Tissot was an individualist whose style and brushwork was neither entirely Academic, according to his training, nor always fashionable, though some of his oil paintings feature looser, more Impressionistic brush strokes.  Though he did not establish trends, he absorbed them into his repertoire and transmuted them into a virtuoso formula all his own.

Tissot, who left his parents’ home in Nantes and moved to Paris in 1856, enrolled at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in March, 1857.  He was 20 years old, and his classes would have included mathematics, anatomy and drawing, but not painting.  He studied painting independently under Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin (1809 – 1864) and Louis Lamothe (1822 – 1869), both of whom had been students of the great Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 – 1867) and taught his principles.  [See On his own: Tissot as a Paris art student, 1855 — 1858.]

He made his début at the Paris Salon in 1859, and hit his stride as an artist by the Salon of 1864, with The Two Sisters and Portrait of Mademoiselle L.L.  In his self-portrait the following year – nine years before his friends joined together to exhibit paintings in a style that would be called “Impressionism” – which was not displayed in public, Tissot delineated his features and clothing in ultra-modern, swift, painterly brush strokes against a minimalist, sketchy background.

But when he received private commissions for portraits of French aristocrats during the Second Empire, he combined his mastery of high finish with his consummate confidence in making his most adroit brush strokes visible.

One of the foremost examples of Tissot’s remarkable brushwork is the ruffled edging of the pink peignoir in Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née, Thérèse Feuillant (1866).

The ruffles, which appear so precise, are graceful, curling strokes of a loaded, round brush.  The folds of the silk velvet dressing gown are thick broad swathes of color, underscored by a right-to-left flutter of white that creates the petticoat peeking underneath.  Zoom in on all the luscious detail here.

Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née, Thérèse Feuillant (1866), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, unframed: 50 1/2 by 30 3/8 in. (128.3 by 77.2 cm). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

In Portrait of Eugène Coppens de Fontenay (1867), a series of a half-dozen thick white curves defines the convex glass cover of the clock’s face.  Rather brilliantly, they are flanked by white in the background and in the foreground – on the left, the lightly-suggested white, back-lit curtains dressing the window reflected in the mirror over the mantel, and on the right, the bold white of shapes of Fontenay’s collar and waistcoat.  Using his brush to apply white paint in different ways, Tissot has defined three-dimensional space on his canvas.

Portrait of Eugène Coppens de Fontenay (1867), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 27 by 15 in. (68.58 by 38.10 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Photo:  Wiki)

The perfectly placed dry brush strokes that Tissot used to define the volume of Gus Burnaby’s black leather boots and give them their astonishing gleam in Captain Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1870) are riveting when viewed at close range.

This painstakingly-detailed portrait was another private commission, this time from a friend in London, his home from mid-1871 to late 1882.

Captain Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1870), by James Tissot. 19.5 by 23.5 in. (49.5 by 59.7 cm). National Portrait Gallery, London. (Photo: Wikipedia)

The seated woman’s flowing hair in Autumn on the Thames (1875) is one of the most enchanting details in Tissot’s work.  With the lightest of touches from his brush, he has made us feel the river breeze as it ripples through her ethereal locks.

Though the figures are highly finished and the palette is that of an Academician, note the looser style in which Tissot painted the water, grass and background landscape.

This picture was not exhibited in public.

Autumn on the Thames, Nuneham Courtney, by James Tissot. 29 by 19 in. (73.66 by 48.26 cm).   Private Collection.  (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

More in the style of his friends in Paris were two other paintings that Tissot did not exhibit, On the Thames, A Heron (c. 1871-72) [figure a] and The Fan (c. 1875) [figure b].  While the figures and their costumes are completed to a high finish and both are painted in a studio rather than en plein air, the landscape backgrounds are rendered in brisk, suggestive strokes, and there is a new sense of movement.  Click here to zoom in on Tissot’s brushwork in On the Thames, A Heron, and pay particular attention to the rippling water and the heron; also see A Closer Look at Tissot’s “The Fan”.

a    b 

Tissot remained, at heart, a painter in the Academic tradition; he was not an Impressionist, concerned with the shifting effect of natural light, vivid colors, and capturing the fleeting experiences of contemporary life as they did.  The Japanese influence in these two paintings is what makes them contemporary.  But as a Frenchman who had emigrated to England after the bloody Paris Commune [see Paris, June 1871], he hardly could have entered canvases painted in “the modern French style” to the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy.

The Bunch of Lilacs (c. 1875), one of two paintings he exhibited at the Royal Academy that year, was more conservative.  Tissot conjures the reflection of a dense array of vegetation and Oriental accessories on a foreshortened grid of decorative tile.  His sure brush creates the ultimate polished floor as a stage for this carefree bird of paradise.

The Bunch of Lilacs (c. 1875), by James Tissot. 21 by 15 in. (53.34 by 38.10 cm).  Private Collection.  Image courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot,” by Lucy Paquette © 2012

Hush! (The Concert, 1875), the second picture Tissot exhibited at the Royal Academy that year, also was highly finished.  Note how he painted the chandelier’s multitude of glittering, highly-defined crystal pendants quite differently when reflected in the mirror.

Hush! (The Concert, 1875), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas; 29.02 by 44.17 in. (73.7 by 112.2 cm). Manchester Art Gallery, U.K. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

Holyday (c. 1876) was one of several paintings Tissot exhibited in 1877 at the exclusive, innovative new Grosvenor Gallery, for which he eschewed his regular showings at the Royal Academy.

Tissot turned the dark shape of the pond into shining water by deft white strokes (as well as floating lily pads) defining the surface, and reflections of the man, woman, tree and cast-iron columns in the background implying its depth.  This treatment of the water, as well as the background of the picture space, is far more finished than that in Autumn on the Thames.  At the same time, Tissot now was, or was giving the impression of, painting en plein air.

Holyday (c. 1876), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 30 by 39 1/8 in. (76.5 by 99.5 cm). Tate Britain.  (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Tissot was masterful in his ability to paint the sheer fabrics of women’s attire.  The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (1877) was one of Tissot’s exhibits at the new Grosvenor Gallery.  In his review of this picture, the critic for The Spectator commented, “We would direct our readers’ attention to the painting of the flesh seen through the thin white muslin dresses, in this picture; manual dexterity could hardly achieve a greater triumph.”  Regardless of Tissot’s skill with the brush, that compliment followed the acerbic observation, “That the ladies are ‘Parisienne,’ dressed in the height of the prevailing fashion, goes without saying, for M. Tissot, though he paints in England, has a thorough Parisian’s contempt for English dress and beauty, and the only time he attempted to paint English girls (in his picture of the ball-room at the Academy [i.e. Too Early, 1873]), he made them all hideous alike.”  [See A Closer Look at Tissot’s “Too Early”.]

The Gallery of the HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth), c. 1876, by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 27 by 36 1/8 in. (68.5 by 92 cm). Tate, London. (Photo: the-athenaeum.org)

In Evening (Le Bal, 1878), the cascade of layered ruffles is a tour de force of Tissot’s ability to define precise, minute folds of fabric, shaded and highlighted and juxtaposed with contrasting trim in related hues.  His lively brushwork lets us feel the volume, weight, and movement of that train.

When Tissot exhibited this painting at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878, the reviewer for The Illustrated London News was only begrudgingly moved:  “’Evening,’ which may be termed at once an ‘arrangement in yellow’ and a glorified excerpt from a Book of the Fashions, [is] brimful of verve, elegance and manual dexterity…Society, we conceive, ought to be very much obliged to so deft an expositor.”

Le Bal/Evening (1878), by James Tissot. 35 7/16 by 19 11/16 in. (90 by 50 cm). Musée d’Orsay.  (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

The highly accomplished French painter succeeding wildly in London despite the British critics carried on, experimenting with brush techniques while staying true to his Academic background.

In A Winter’s Walk (1878), Tissot painted the fur and the foliage in quick, overlapping strokes of varied hues, dragging out the color of the fur with a stiff, dry brush to indicate its soft texture while blurring the edges of the greenery to indicate its rough texture and its distance in the background.  He rendered the rich, heavy dress fabric by laying on tints and shades of color with a broad brush, and he enlivened the sober palette with a flash of gold in the captivating detail of Kathleen Newton’s pair of gold bracelets.  Tissot’s painterly glint on the smooth bangle and expertly-applied highlights on the rope cuff make this jewelry an exquisite focal point of her costume, all the more solid with the juxtaposition of the sketchily outlined, diaphanous trim peeking from her sleeve.

This picture was not exhibited in public.

A Winter’s Walk (Promenade dans la neige) (c. 1878), by James Tissot.  Oil on canvas, 31.10 by 14.57 in. (79.00 by 37 cm).  Private Collection.  (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

In A Type of Beauty (1880), Kathleen Newton’s black lace mitts are delicately painted over her flesh with a small brush.  The curves of the rope cuff bracelets, flecked with gold highlights, and the further curves of two layers of wispy white ruffles, keep the volume of her forearm from being flattened out by Tissot’s exacting depiction of the lace’s fine pattern.

But Mrs. Newton’s shining curls – just as fine – are loosely described using a soft brush that repeats the highlights of the gold bracelet.

The texture of the trim at her sleeve was created with a stiff, square brush whose bristles barely traced the white paint.

A Type of Beauty (Portrait of Kathleen Newton, 1880), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 23 by 18 in. (58.42 by 45.72 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

James Tissot excelled at accurate depictions and descriptive brushwork; he was not an innovator like his friends Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet and James Whistler.  Though his style has been unfavorably compared to theirs over the decades, Degas once considered him far more skilled.  In 1868, Tissot left copious technical notes for Degas on how to improve one of his paintings-in-progress, Interior (The Rape), at Degas’ apparent request; clearly, this was the relationship they had.  Tissot knew what he was doing, and some found his artistic confidence irritating:  one critic at this time observed that Tissot was dapper and personable, but thought him a little pretentious and a less-than-great artist “because he did what he wanted to do and as he wished to do it.”

And he was successful at it:  Tissot’s brushwork, in addition to his subject matter and composition, continues to delight and draw us into his paintings.  Who could ask for more?

Related posts:

James Tissot, the painter art critics love to hate

Tissot’s Brush with Impressionism

Tissot and Manet attempt to help their friend Degas, 1868

Was James Tissot a Plagiarist?

More “Plagiarists”: Tissot’s friends Manet, Degas, Whistler & Others

©  2018 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

The articles published on this blog are copyrighted by Lucy Paquette.  An article or any portion of it may not be reproduced in any medium or transmitted in any form, electronic or mechanical, without the author’s permission.  You are welcome to cite or quote from an article provided you give full acknowledgement to the author. 

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).    See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYV

All prices listed are for general reader interest only, and are shown in this order:  $ (USD)/£ (GBP).  All prices listed are Hammer Price (the winning bid amount) unless noted as Premium, indicating that the figure quoted includes the Buyer’s Premium of an additional percentage charged by the auction house, as well as taxes.

James Tissot characteristically painted beautiful, well-dressed women either in languorous poses or in scenes of psychological tension.  But just as often, he depicted contemporary women passing the day in leisure.  These women simply exist in loveliness.  And two art auctions, one this summer and one a half-dozen years ago, highlighted how two of Tissot’s women were perfectly matched with private collectors who themselves were ladies of leisure – a Vanderbilt of the Gilded Age, and a European aristocrat of our own time – living along New York’s exclusive Fifth Avenue.

At the Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite & British Impressionist Art sale at Sotheby’s, London in July, 2018, James Tissot’s Le goûter (The Snack, 1869) sold to a private collector for £ 187,500 GBP.  Set in Tissot’s opulent Parisian villa in the rue de l’impératrice (Empress Avenue, now avenue Foch), it depicts an elegantly-dressed woman caught reviving herself with a sip of wine and a bit of fruit.  The model is wearing the same costume as the woman in In Church (1865-1869); as if she has just returned from a promenade, she has removed her bonnet and set it at the edge of the table.

Le goûter (The Snack, 1869), by James Tissot.  (Oil on canvas, 21.5 by 14.25 in. 
(54 by 36 cm).  Private collection. (Courtesy of the-atheneaum.org)

The 1874 catalogue records  for Goupil’s art gallery in Paris include this painting as Le goûter (Afternoon tea).  By 1883, Le goûter was in the collection of William H. Vanderbilt (1821 – 1885), who lived in a mansion at 660 Fifth Avenue, New York, that Vanderbilt’s wife, Alva, commissioned in 1878 from Richard Morris Hunt after William inherited the bulk of his father’s his $100 million estate in 1877.  Built in a French Renaissance and Gothic style, the mansion was referred to as the Petit Château, and its grand interiors were furnished from trips to Europe, with items from antique shops and from “pillaging the ancient homes of impoverished nobility.”

Le goûter was passed to William Henry’s youngest son, art collector George W. Vanderbilt (1862 – 1914), whose New York residence comprised two identical, five-story white marble mansions at 645 and 647 Fifth Avenue, between E. 51^st and E. 52^nd Streets, designed by Hunt & Hunt in 1905 as a “free interpretation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century palazzi.”

Cornelius “Neily” III Vanderbilt (Wiki)

George W. Vanderbilt left this residence to his nephew, Cornelius “Neily” III Vanderbilt (1873 – 1942), who had been disinherited by his father in 1896 for becoming engaged to Grace Graham Wilson (1870 – 1953), the daughter of a New York banker [upon his father’s death in 1899, he received only $500,000 in cash and the income from a $1 million trust fund].

Grace, a popular member of the smart international set of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), was considered an “adventuress.”  Less than thrilled to inherit an old mansion which she referred to as “The Black Hole of Calcutta, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt hired architect Horace Trombauer to make improvements and filled the house with 18th century French furniture and tapestries.  In 1917, ready to establish residence, she hired a staff of 30 including an English butler and six footman liveried in the Vanderbilt maroon.  Meanwhile, Cornelius, who prior to his marriage had earned a degree in mechanical engineering at Yale, had joined the New York National Guard in 1901.  In 1916, he was mobilized and served in an engineering regiment that was shipped to France in mid-1918.  Shortly after his arrival there, Vanderbilt was promoted to brigadier general.

Grace Graham Wilson Vanderbilt

After the war, he preferred life on his yacht to life with his wife, who entertained endlessly and lavishly in their New York mansion.  But by 1940, with taxes almost $60,000 a year on the house, he sold it to Lord John Jacob Astor V (later 1st Baron Astor of Hever, 1886 – 1971), with the provision that his wife could live there until three years after his death.  He died in 1942, and in 1944, Grace Vanderbilt moved up Fifth Avenue to a house at 86th Street which is now the Neue Galerie.  Le goûter was in her possession from 1945, when the marble mansion at 645 Fifth Avenue was demolished.  (Its twin mansion at 647 has been Versace’s flagship store since 1995.)

Later with Stair-Sainty Fine Art, New York, Tissot’s Le goûter offered for sale by an anonymous owner at Sotheby’s, New York, in 1982.  It was sold at the same auction house in 1987, again anonymously, to a private U.S. collector for $ 95,000 USD/£ 56,581 GBP (Hammer price).  In 2010, the painting was offered for sale at Christie’s, New York with an estimated price of $ 300,000 – 500,000 USD, but it did not find a buyer until eight years later.

Less familiar than other paintings by Tissot, Le goûter has been exhibited only twice:  when it was on loan to The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1902 to 1907, and when it was included in the exhibition James Tissot at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 1984.

The Morning Ride (1872-1876), by James Tissot.  Oil on canvas, 26.26 by 38.35 in. (66.70 by 97.40 cm). Private collection. (the-athenaeum.org)

The Morning Ride (c. 1872-1876), another of James Tissot’s lesser-known paintings, was purchased at the 19th Century European Art sale at Sotheby’s, New York in 2012 for $1,874,500 USD/£ 1,160,681 GBP (Premium).  It depicts a pallid woman of means, a convalescent or perhaps an invalid, being drawn in a donkey cart through a path flanked by multi-colored banks of rhododendrons in full bloom.  Her ruddy-faced male companion, well dressed and sporting knee breeches, pauses in a casual and familiar manner to let her caress the blossoms.  Her maid rides side-saddle on a donkey behind them.  Tissot conveys the spring chill by the gloves they wear and the lady’s fur-trimmed coat and lap blanket.

Monique Uzielli

By about 1898, the painting was with the Thomas McLean gallery, London.  Decades later, it was owned by Hugo Hanak, a Czechoslovakian collector, who sold it at Parke Bernet, New York in 1944.  It was acquired there by art historian and antiques dealer Jacques Helft (1891 – 1980), brother-in-law of art dealer Paul Rosenberg (1881 – 1959).  Around 1955-56, The Morning Ride was with the Weitzner Gallery, New York, and about 1960, it was acquired by European aristocrat and noted collector Mrs. Monique Uzielli (née de Günzburg, 1913 – 2011), New York.  She was the great-granddaughter of Joseph, Baron Günzburg (1812 – 1878), a Jewish philanthropist, banker, and financier who helped fund the development of Russia’s railroad network.

In 1959, Mrs. Uzielli had purchased a Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment at East 92nd Street, featuring fabulous, 360-degree views over the city and Central Park with 4,780 square feet of terrace space; originally it was the top floor of the 14-story home of cereal heiress and socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post.  Mrs. Uzielli’s tastes as a collector ranged from early Southeast Asian sculpture to European art to the 1960s couture gowns she gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mrs. Uzielli occasionally loaned The Morning Ride to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for exhibitions from 1975 to 1993.  She died in Montreux, Switzerland in October 2011, and by January, 2012, her 1925 penthouse was put on the market for $29,500,000 [and sold for $30.9 million in 2014].  Her Tissot painting was sold to a private collector at the beginning of May.

Will the new owners of Le goûter and The Morning Ride share them with the public now and then – especially with the James Tissot retrospective in Paris and San Francisco approaching in 2019-2020?

Related posts:

James Tissot’s brilliant marketing tool, 1869

James Tissot oils at auction: Seven favorites

Kathleen Newton by James Tissot: eight auctioned oil paintings

James Tissot’s Church Ladies

The Artist’s Closet: James Tissot’s Prop Costumes

© 2018 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

The articles published on this blog are copyrighted by Lucy Paquette.  An article or any portion of it may not be reproduced in any medium or transmitted in any form, electronic or mechanical, without the author’s permission.  You are welcome to cite or quote from an article provided you give full acknowledgement to the author. 

For further reading:

A guide to the gilded age mansions of 5th Avenue’s millionaire row, by Michelle Young, August 22, 2017.

The two Mrs. Vanderbilts, by David Patrick Columbia and Jeffrey Hirsch, December 31, 2007.

The Vanderbilts: How American Royalty Lost Their Crown Jewels, by Natalie Robehmed, July 14, 2014.

The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

(295 pages; ISBN (ePub):  978-0-615-68267-9).

See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.

NOTE:  If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.  Read reviews.

Did James Tissot paint animals because they appealed to Victorian sensibilities, because they were part of the life around him that he recorded so faithfully, or because they enhanced his subjects with symbolic meaning?

Numerous artists of Tissot’s time achieved great success as animaliers – animal painters – including Sir Edwin Henry Landseer RA (1802 – 1873), Rosa Bonheur (1822 – 1899), Briton Rivière RA (1840 – 1920), and Charles Burton Barber (1845–1894). Landseer, also a notable sculptor who created the lions at Trafalgar Square, was popular with the aristocracy as well as the middle class, whose homes often featured reproductions of his works, which often sentimentalized dogs. Bonheur, a French artist popular in England, was known for her realistic depiction of animals, especially cattle. Rivière focused on animal subjects from the mid-1860s, and he grew famous as his animal paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy often were engraved. Barber, famous for his sentimental paintings of children and their pets, especially dogs, received commissions from Queen Victoria to paint her grandchildren and dogs.

Around 1868, Tissot’s Un déjeuner (A Luncheon), set in the French Directoire period (1795 to 1799), featured a small, furry white lap dog with floppy ears – perhaps a flirtatious companion in this scene of seduction.

When the British invaded and looted the Chinese Imperial Palace in 1860 during the Second Opium War, they brought pug dogs back to England, where they were first exhibited in 1861.

The ancient breed treasured by Chinese emperors was highly fashionable in Europe up through the eighteenth century; now Queen Victoria owned and bred pugs. The dogs became popular and often were depicted in paintings, greeting cards, and postcards of the time.

The Queen’s pugs were painted by Scottish artist Gourlay Steell RSA (1819 – 1894) around 1867.

Anglophilia was fashionable in France at the time, and Tissot, painting in Paris while well aware of trends in England, began to include pugs in a series of paintings set in the Directoire: Fig. a, La Cheminée (By the Fireside, c. 1869); Fig. b, Unaccepted (1869); Fig. c, Jeune femme en bateau (Young Woman in a Boat, 1870); Fig. d, La partie carrée (The Foursome, 1870); and Fig. e, Un souper sous le Directoire (c. 1870). [See James Tissot’s Directoire series, 1868-71.]

a      b     c

d     e

Since Tissot’s compositions featuring pugs were painted shortly after the breed was rediscovered, and since they became the only dog breed he featured in this series, it is likely he included them to boost sales as well as to add a lively detail.

Tama the Japanese Dog (c. 1875), by Edouard Manet. (www.the-athenaeum.org)

Shortly after the fad for pugs began in England, the retired first British Minister to Japan, Sir Rutherford Alcock (1809 – 1897) made a sensation showing his collection of exotic treasures at his Japanese Pavilion at the 1862 London International Exhibition, beginning another trend that turned Tissot’s artistic (and business) inspiration away from pugs. After the signing of the first commercial treaty between Japan and America in 1854, more than 200 years of Japanese seclusion had come to an end. In the French capitol, a host of import shops cropped up to cater to the new craze for “japonisme,” and by November, 1864, when the famed Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti tried to buy Japanese items in Paris, he “found all the costumes were being snapped up by a French artist, Tissot, who it seems is doing three Japanese pictures.” These were three similar paintings featuring elegant young women looking at Japanese objects; French painter Berthe Morisot, after visiting the Paris Salon in 1869, wrote to her sister, “The Tissots seem to have become quite Chinese this year.” Tissot brilliantly used the chic “Oriental” studio in his new English-style villa in the rue de l’Impératrice (now avenue Foch) as a showcase to display his impressive collection of Japanese and Chinese art and artifacts, attracting princes and princesses – and commissions.

Focused on this new trend, Tissot ceased attracting buyers by adding the pug dog to his compositions, with the exception of Waiting (c. 1873, also known as In the Shallows), painted within two years of his emigration to England in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. A few years later, Tissot’s friend Edouard Manet combined the interest in dogs and japonisme in Tama the Japanese Dog (c. 1875), above, one of a few dog portraits he produced.

Waiting (In the Shallows, c. 1873), by James Tissot.  Private Collection.  (Photo: Wiki)

In a different vein, Tissot painted companion dogs in portraits of their aristocratic owners in France and England, and he rendered them with great skill and sensitivity.

Richard Peers Symons, MP (1770-71), by Joshua Reynolds (Photo:  Wiki)

By 1865, Tissot had found an entrée to patrons in the French aristocracy and was commissioned to paint The Marquis and the Marquise de Miramon and their children [René de Cassagne de Beaufort, Marquis de Miramon (1835-1882), his wife, née Thérèse Feuillant (1836-1912), and their first two children, Geneviève and Léon on the terrace of the château de Paulhac in Auvergne]. Tissot depicted them outdoors, as an informal, affectionate family in the English-style elegance of a Thomas Gainsborough (1727 – 1788) or a Joshua Reynolds portrait (1723 – 1792). In this painting, which served as Tissot’s calling card to the lucrative market for Society portraiture, he prominently features the Miramon’s large and regal black dog, a retriever or perhaps pointer mix that may have been the Marquis’ favorite hunting dog as well as a beloved family pet. An oil study for the painting shows that Tissot relocated the dog from what initially was conceived as a central position with Léon to a more natural pose at Léon’s feet; Tissot used the dog, in the end, to enliven the central spot at the bottom of the canvas. In a decision that finally unifies the subjects in a pleasing composition, Tissot changed the Marquis’ pose so that his crossed legs lead the eye down his long black boots to the strong black diagonal of the reclining dog. Tissot put as much thought into the dog’s placement in the painting as the human subjects, indicating its importance in the commission.

Three years later, in a group portrait of the members of The Circle of the Rue Royale (1868), Tissot featured a Dalmatian that clearly was important to at least one of the aristocrats who contributed toward the commission. Again, the dog is featured in the center of the composition, where its spotted coat enlivens the expanse of checkerboard marble tile and echos the colors of the stylish black and white hounds tooth trousers of Count Julien de Rochechouart, seated with a cigarette in his right hand. With its handsome profile and long body with outstretched paws, the Dalmatian has as much presence and poise as the twelve men in another composition emulating English-style portraiture of aristocrats and their dogs.

After emigrating to England with less than one hundred francs but with numerous British friends, Tissot received considerable help in establishing his career anew in London. Frances, Countess Waldegrave (1821-1879), who shared Tissot’s interest in spiritualism, hosted fabulous salons in London and at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham. Frequent guests included Gladstone, Disraeli, and the Prince and Princess of Wales. In 1871 – shortly after Tissot had fled the Bloody Week in Paris – the charming and “irresistible” Countess Waldegrave pulled strings to get Tissot a lucrative commission to paint a full-length portrait of her fourth husband, Chichester Fortescue (right). It was funded by a group of eighty-one Irishmen including forty-nine MPs, five Roman Catholic bishops and twenty-seven peers to commemorate his term as Chief Secretary for Ireland under Gladstone – as a present to his wife. Fortescue, later Baron Carlingford (1823 – 1898) was a politically ambitious Irishman and Liberal MP for County Louth from 1847 to 1868. In 1863, he married the politically influential Countess Waldegrave, previously the wife of the 7th Earl Waldegrave, who had chosen him out of the three or more men who wished to marry her. Fortescue had been in love with her for a decade before her elderly third husband died. Tissot may have included the perky white terrier-type dog at his feet as a way of humanizing a quiet, bookish man described as “pedantic” but capable of great love.

Tissot also received a commission from his great friend, Tommy Bowles (Thomas Gibson Bowles, 1841 – 1922), who lived at Cleeve Lodge in Hyde Park. [To read more about their friendship, click here and here.]  Tommy Bowles was the illegitimate son of Thomas Milner Gibson (1806 – 1884), a Liberal MP for Manchester and President of the Board of Trade from 1859 to 1866, and Susannah Bowles, a servant. Tommy was an adorable little boy, and his stepmother, Arethusa Susannah (1814 – 1885), a Society hostess who was the only child of Sir Thomas Gery Cullum (1777 –1855) of Hardwick House, Suffolk, insisted that he be raised with his father’s family of four sons and two daughters. Tommy’s favorite half-sister was Sydney Milner-Gibson, nearly eight years younger, and in 1871, when Sydney was 22, he commissioned Tissot to paint her portrait. Tissot captured the sweet, reticent personality and awkwardness of his friend’s beloved younger sister, who posed caressing her medium-sized black dog. The presence of her pet, which somewhat resembles a German Spitz, may have made her more comfortable, but it also fills the space created by the way she sits across the chair. Had she stood, with the dog at her feet, the composition would have been much less interesting.

f         g

The Victorians set great store by animals, and dogs especially exemplified loyalty and the affection and comfort of domestic life. In J.E Millais’ The Black Brunswicker (1860), left, the dog sweetly joins the woman in begging the soldier not to depart for battle.

The central figure in Briton Rivière’s Fidelity (1869), Fig. f, is impoverished, incarcerated, injured and abandoned by all – except for his dog.

In Charles Burton Barber’s Blond and Brunette (1879), Fig. g, the affectionate pug and the pretty woman make an adorable duo.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, innumerable such paintings were produced throughout the Western world playing to the emotional appeal of canine companions.

h    i

But James Tissot’s depictions of dogs had more in common with those of his friends in Paris than with those in sentimental Victorian paintings.

For instance, Tissot’s use of the white dog in Croquet (c. 1878), Fig. h, is more comparable to Edouard Manet’s inclusion of two small dogs in The Croquet Party (1871), Fig. i: the dogs simply are present, though they add motion and visual interest to the scene of human leisure activity.

The same is true of Tissot’s Fête Day in Brighton (c. 1875-78), right, in which the dog trotting ahead of the woman and the flags waving behind her add a sense of movement to her otherwise still figure, and a sense of depth to the picture.

Tissot’s own border collie, which he painted in The Hammock (1879) (see below) and Quiet (c. 1881), Fig. j – reflect the artist’s realistic depiction of the scene. Akin to In Deep Thought (1881), Fig. k, by Alfred Stevens, Tissot’s friend in Paris, the dog mirrors the psychological state of the subject.

j     k

While dogs had symbolic meaning in art, James Tissot, a shrewd businessman, likely included dogs in many of his compositions because they appealed to Victorian sensibilities and because they were part of the life around him that he recorded so faithfully.

This is how Tissot painted other animals: not as fascinating creatures in their own right, as Edgar Degas painted racehorses, but in service to the people who were the subjects of his compositions: the horses in Les Adieux (The Farewells) 1871, and The Shop Girl (c 1883-85) merely wait while their owners go about their business, and the horse in Going to Business (Going to the City, c. 1879), like the donkeys in The Morning Ride (1872-1876), and even (despite its title) the heron in On the Thames, A Heron (c. 1871-72), is providing the action in the scene without being its subject.

Tissot’s animals exist only in relation to the human psychology and activity that were the focus of his work.

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Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library

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