James Tissot in the Roaring ‘20s

For sale: A Visit to the Yacht, c. 1873, by James Tissot

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.

↧

Girls to Float Your Boat, by James Tissot

June 15, 2014, 12:56 pm

≫ Next: James Tissot in the 1940s: La Mystérieuse is identified

≪ Previous: Tissot’s Comeback in the 1930s

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.

Recently, I had the opportunity to steer a schooner out toward the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. It was a perfect day with a lively cool wind, the bay was a sparkling blue, and the experience was pure water and sky. I should have applied more sunscreen, since I found myself with a bit of sunburn when the cruise ended back at Annapolis, Maryland.

James Tissot, raised in the seaport of Nantes, France, painted boats and ships in paintings such as Le Départ de l’enfant prodigue à Venise (c. 1863) from the early years of his career.

Often, these canvases have no sense of movement and lack air – clearly, many of his scenes were composed inside his elegant studio in Paris (in which he painted from early 1868 through at least the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871) and from 1875 to 1882, in the luxurious studio he constructed at his home at 17 (now 44) Grove End Road in St. John’s Wood, London.

But his images of beautiful women on the river and the sea are charming, imbued with nautical insight and a sense of seafaring delight even in those that are, really, costume pieces. Others were a little naughty, and some were even controversial.

Jeune femme en bateau (Young Woman in a Boat, 1870), by James Tissot. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Tissot painted several versions of Young Woman in a Boat (1870) from his studio in the avenue de l’Impératrice (now avenue Foch) in Paris. One, oil on panel measuring 13 by 9 in. (33.02 by 22.86 cm) was sold in 1979 at Sotheby’s, Belgravia for $ 862/£ 380. In 1985, an oil on canvas measuring 20 by 26 in. (50.80 by 66.04 cm) sold at Sotheby’s, London for $ 402,721/£ 310,000; this version was displayed at the Salon in 1870, one of Tissot’s final two oils exhibited in Paris prior to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War the following year. Another version of Young Woman in a Boat, oil on paper measuring just 5 by 7 in. (12.70 by 17.78 cm), was sold in 1995 at Sotheby’s, London for $ 8,769/£ 5,500.

People often observe that Tissot’s women are languid, superficial creatures, but when this painting appeared in England, a critic there commented that the woman looked angry and impatient at being kept waiting by her lover. If this was Tissot’s intent (and he deftly defied such easy interpretations), then this woman, with her frank gaze at the viewer, is a rare breed in Victorian painting: the fully developed, adult female. But of course, she is not an authentic, contemporary woman. Her feminine annoyance is permissible in the guise of a costumed anecdote from the French Directory period, 1795 – 1799. Imagine an exasperated adult woman dressed in the latest fashion looking frankly at a male viewer from the wall of the Salon or the Royal Academy in 1870!

On the River (c. 1871), by James Tissot. Watercolor version, 23.5 by 34.3 cm. Private Collection. (Photo by Wikipaintings.org)

On the River (1871), measuring 34 by 19 in. (86.36 by 48.26 cm) was sold at Sotheby’s, London for $ 1,175/£ 420 in 1964 and is now in the government’s collection in the U.K. (although, oddly, no details are available – not even its whereabouts). It’s an oil on canvas, brightly colored and gorgeously detailed. Another oil version of On the River (1876), measuring 33 by 19 in. (83.82 by 48.26 cm) sold at Sotheby’s, London in 1959 for $ 615/£ 220. As Lady on the river, this version sold at the same auction house in 1972 for $ 7,290/£ 3,100.

On the Thames, A Heron (c. 1871-72), by James Tissot. 36 1/2 by 23 3/4 in. (92.71 by 60.33 cm). Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota, U.S. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

James Tissot fled Paris after the Franco-Prussian War and its bloody aftermath, the Commune. [To read about Paris in June, 1871, click here.] On the Thames, A Heron (c. 1871-1872) is 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 was owned by wealthy Spanish banker José de Murrieta. Murrieta tried to sell the painting on May 24, 1873 as On the Thames: the frightened heron; priced at 570 guineas, it did not find a buyer. His brother, Antonio de Murrieta, attempted and failed to sell it on June 15, 1873 for 260 guineas. As The Heron, the painting was sold by Sotheby’s, New York in 1973 for $ 32,000/£ 12,886. On the Thames, A Heron was the gift of collector Mrs. Patrick Butler, by exchange in 1975, to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and is displayed in Gallery G357. For an interactive view of it, click here.

Autumn on the Thames, Nuneham Courtney (c. 1871-72), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 29 by 19 in. (73.66 by 48.26 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

Autumn on the Thames, Nuneham Courtney (c. 1871-72), was sold at Sotheby’s, New York in 1984 for $ 200,000/£ 167,855. Nine and a half years later, in 1994, it again was sold at Sotheby’s, New York, this time for $ 425,000/£ 281,270. Nuneham Courtney, near Oxford, was a popular destination for picnics after a row or punt up the Thames. Art historian Nancy Rose Marshall points out that this picture was more likely painted between 1874 and 1876, when Tissot used the same blonde model in the foreground for Quarrelling.

The Return from the Boating Trip (1873), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 24 by 17 in. (60.96 by 43.18 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

Still on Top, by James Tissot. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

The Return from the Boating Trip (1873) was sold at Christie’s, London in 1982 for $ 31,852/£ 20,000.

Note that Tissot used the same the male model in Autumn on the Thames, Nuneham Courtney.

Tissot used the woman’s striped gown again in Boarding the Yacht (1873, Private Collection) and The Captain and the Mate (1873, Private Collection), as well as in Still on Top (c. 1874, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand) and Preparing for the Gala (Private Collection).

Tissot used the dress yet again in Portsmouth Dockyard (also known as Entre les deux mon coeur balance, or How Happy I Could Be with Either, c. 1877, Tate Britain, London). Exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery from May to June 1877, Portsmouth Dockyard depicts an officer wearing the uniform of the 42^nd Royal Highland regiment, known as the “Black Watch.” The picture was well-received, which was Tissot’s intention after the harsh criticism of The Thames the previous year at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1876 (see below); the Times art critic described Portsmouth Dockyard as a painting in which “a happy Highland sergeant finds himself to his huge content afloat in company with two sprightly ladies.” Novelist Sir Hugh Walpole (1884 – 1941), an art collector, bequeathed Portsmouth Dockyard to the Tate in 1941. It is not on display.

Portsmouth Dockyard (also known as Entre les deux mon coeur balance, or How Happy I Could Be with Either, c. 1877) c. 1877) by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 15 by 21 1/2 in. (38 by 54.5 cm.) Tate, London. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

Sur la Tamise, return from Henley (also known as On the Thames, c. 1874), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 57.48 by 40.04 in. (146.00 by 101.70 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

The Ball on Shipboard (c. 1874), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 33 1/8 by 51 in. (84 by 130 cm). Tate, London. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Tissot exhibited The Ball on Shipboard at the Royal Academy in London from May through August 1874, three years after he had left Paris in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Reviewers (but interestingly, not Tissot himself) identified the setting as the yearly regatta at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. Tissot assured Berthe Morisot, who was at Cowes during regatta week the following year while on her honeymoon with Édouard Manet’s brother, Eugène, that they saw the most fashionable society in England. But one critic of The Ball on Shipboard 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.” Yet another found it “garish and almost repellent.” Regardless, London art dealer Thomas Agnew – 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. (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 Ball on Shipboard later belonged to Philipson’s son’s widow, Mrs. Roland Philipson (c. 1866 – 1945), then the Leicester Galleries, London, and by 1937, to Alfred Munnings (1878 – 1959), a self-taught equine painter who loathed Modernism and revered artists such as James Tissot, for their pictures that aimed “to fill a man’s soul with admiration and sheer joy, not to bewilder him and daze him.” (Summer in February, a film released in 2013 based on Jonathan Smith’s 1995 novel and starring Dominic Cooper, Dan Stevens and Emily Browning, dramatizes the love triangle between the young Alfred Munnings, his friend, and the woman they both loved.) Munnings was elected a Royal Academician in 1925, and The Ball on Shipboard was presented to the Tate by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest in 1937. The painting is not on display.

Christopher Wood (1941 – 2009), director of Nineteenth Century Paintings at Christie’s, London from 1963 to 1976 and then an art dealer at the forefront of the revival in interest of Victorian art in the late 20^th century with his gallery in Belgravia, believed that Tissot painted most of The Ball on Shipboard in his studio [in St. John's Wood], using his own collection of dresses, flags and other props.

The Gallery of 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: Wikimedia.org)

Tissot exhibited The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth), c. 1876, at the Grosvenor Gallery from May to June 1877. The painting puzzled some critics, who felt its meaning should have been made clear by Tissot. Others needed no meaning beyond the shapely form of the woman in the foreground. At least one critic openly admired Tissot’s technical virtuosity, writing, “We would direct our readers’ attention to the painting of the flesh seen through the thin white muslin dresses…manual dexterity could hardly achieve a greater triumph.” The picture was owned by J. Robertson Reid, then Henry Trengrouse, Teddington. It was sold by Trengrouse’s executors at the Puttick and Simpson sale in London in 1929, and purchased by the Leicester Galleries, London, for 16 guineas. It then was purchased by industrialist and art collector Samuel Courtauld (1876 – 1947), London. By 1908, Courtauld was general manager of Samuel Courtauld and Company, Great Britain’s dominant silk producer, which had developed rayon, an artificial silk. He served as chairman of the family firm from 1921 to 1946, presenting The Gallery of HMS Calcutta to the Tate in 1936. It is not on display.

HMS Calcutta, built in Bombay, was designed by Sir Robert Sepping and launched in 1831. It was retired in 1877 to become an experimental gunnery ship in Portsmouth.

On the Thames (1876), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 28.5 x 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

Tissot displayed The Thames (now called On 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 due to what they considered the depiction of a thoroughly unBritish subject – prostitution. The two women in The Thames were perceived as “undeniably Parisian ladies,” and the picture itself, “More French, shall we say, than English?” [Repeat after me: There was no prostitution in Victorian England!] Over sixty years later, when everyone had calmed down, the painting was purchased by the Wakefield Corporation in September, 1938 for the collection of the Hepworth Wakefield Art Gallery, Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

Another Tissot oil painting of a woman in a rowboat, Waiting (c. 1873, also known as In the Shallows) was sold at Christie’s June 17, 2014 sale of Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite & British Impressionist Art in London. Estimated at $849,500 – $1,359,200 USD/£500,000 – £800,000 GBP, it actually sold for $1,635,288 USD/£962,500 GBP (Premium). Waiting, sold for 700 guineas on April 1, 1874, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874 along with The Ball on Shipboard (c.1874, Tate Britain) and London Visitors (c.1874, Toledo Museum of Art).

Related blog posts:

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

Tissot in the U.K.: Northern England

A moment away from my laptop, in New York’s Central Park.

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 in the 1940s: La Mystérieuse is identified

June 29, 2014, 5:34 pm

≫ Next: James Tissot in the era of Abstract Expressionism

≪ Previous: Girls to Float Your Boat, by James Tissot

All auction 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.

As of 1940, there were forty oil paintings by James Tissot in public art collections worldwide: sixteen in the U.K., fifteen in France, three in the U.S., one in Canada, one in India, two in New Zealand, and two in Australia. Interest in James Tissot’s work continued into the years during and after World War II, and museums in the U.K., Ireland, and the U.S. acquired four more of his canvases in this decade.

Portsmouth Dockyard (c. 1877) by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 15 by 21 1/2 in. (38 by 54.5 cm). Tate, London. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery from May to June 1877 as Portsmouth Dockyard, the scene depicts an officer wearing the uniform of the 42^nd Royal Highland regiment, known as the “Black Watch.” The picture was well-received, which was Tissot’s intention after the harsh criticism of The Thames the previous year at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1876. Reviewers objected to that painting for what they considered the depiction of a thoroughly unBritish subject – prostitution. The two women in The Thames were perceived as “undeniably Parisian ladies,” and the picture itself, “More French, shall we say, than English?” But the Times art critic described the subsequent version, Portsmouth Dockyard, as a painting in which “a happy Highland sergeant finds himself to his huge content afloat in company with two sprightly ladies.”

Portsmouth Dockyard was owned successively by Henry Jump (1820 – 1893), a wealthy Justice of the Peace and corn merchant living at Gateacre, Lancashire; James Jump, Ipswich, who died at 50 in 1905; and Captain Henry Jump, Heytesbury. Captain Jump sold the picture at Christie’s, London, in 1937 as Divided Attention. It was purchased by Leicester Galleries, London, for 58 guineas, and sold to novelist Sir Hugh Walpole (1884 – 1941), London. Walpole had just been knighted, having returned from Hollywood, where he wrote two screenplays for David O. Selznick: David Copperfield (1935), in which he had a bit part as the Vicar of Blunderstone, and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936). Walpole also was an art collector who left fourteen works to the Tate and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Portsmouth Dockyard was left to the Tate by Walpole upon his death in 1941. It is not on display.

The following year, an older work by Tissot became accessible to the public at the Hermitage Museum in Norfolk, Virginia.

Marguerite in Church (1865) is one of Tissot’s early works, when as a young artist he imitated the work of the popular Belgian painter Hendrik Leys (1815 –1869). Leys’ painting, The Trental Mass of Berthal de Haze – replete with numerous characters enacting a historical drama against a detailed architectural background – won a gold medal at the 1855 Paris International Exhibition.

In 1859, Tissot traveled to Antwerp, augmenting his art education by taking lessons in Leys’ studio. Of the six paintings by Tissot accepted for the 1861 Salon, three were based on Goethe’s Faust: The Meeting of Faust and Marguerite, Faust and Marguerite in the Garden, and Marguerite at the Service. Tissot had imitated Leys’ fifteenth-century costumes, historical architecture and meticulous details.

A critic of these medieval scenes wrote, “Stop thief! Leys could shout to the Tissot painting; he took my individuality, my skin, like a thief at night carries off a piece of clothing left on a chair.” It wasn’t until 1864, with Two Sisters and Portrait of Mlle. L.L. that Tissot began to paint modern subjects, but he continued to paint medieval scenes for another year or two as well.

At the Hermitage Museum in Norfolk, Virginia with Marguerite in Church (1865), by James Tissot.

Marguerite in Church, an oil painting on a wood panel, was purchased at Christie’s, London, in 1927. Without a frame, it was a gift for Florence Sloane, the wife of William Sloane, who came to Norfolk, Virginia, in 1887 to work in his uncle’s knitting mills. William and Florence were from wealthy families in New York, where they married in 1893. After his uncle died, Sloane took over three mills, renamed the business William Sloane & Co. and acquired Tidewater Knitting Mill in Portsmouth, Virginia. In 1908, the Sloanes built an Arts and Crafts style house on the shore of the Lafayette River in Norfolk and called it The Hermitage.

During World War I, William Sloane’s mills turned out thousands of pairs of fleece-lined long underwear for the Army and Navy while Florence volunteered as postmistress, sewed for the Red Cross, helped at the local hospitals and entertained American, Australian and English troops on the lawn and gardens of her home with cookouts, games and music on summer weekends from 1914 to 1918. The Sloanes entertained as many as 1,800 guests at a time.

Mrs. Sloane helped secure the land for what would become the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, which began as the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences 1926. William Sloane was its first president, and Florence Sloane its first director. Even so, Florence traveled to Europe and built an extensive art collection of her own, which was opened to the public in 1942. You can see James Tissot’s Marguerite in Church – now framed – at The Hermitage Museum and Gardens.

The Three Crows Inn, Gravesend, by James Tissot (c. 1873). Oil on canvas, 63 by 91 cm. Courtesy www.jamestissot.org

The Three Crows Inn, Gravesend, by James Tissot (c. 1873). Oil on canvas, 63 by 91 cm. Courtesy http://www.jamestissot.org

In 1943, The Three Crows Inn, Gravesend, c.1873 was purchased for the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. This oil study was the basis for Tissot’s 1877 etching of the same title.

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

James Tissot, Kathleen Newton and her children Violet and Cecil, 1879. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

At the age of 17, convent-educated Kathleen Kelly married Isaac Newton, a surgeon in the Indian Civil Service, at Hoshearpoor on January 3, 1871. She had been sent from England to India for this arranged marriage, but on the ship, she met a naval officer, Captain Palliser. A week after the marriage, when Kathleen had confessed her association with and preference for Captain Palliser, the couple separated, and Dr. Newton filed for divorce on the grounds of adultery. He funded her return to England later that year, and she gave birth to Palliser’s daughter, Muriel Violet Mary Newton, at her father’s house in Yorkshire on December 20.

On March 21, 1876, then living with her sister in St. John’s Wood, London, Kathleen gave birth to a son, Cecil George, and reported the father’s name as Isaac Newton. Kathleen’s sister, Mary Pauline Ashburnham Kelly Hervey (1851/52 – 1896), had married a colonel in the Indian Army in 1874 and had two children: Isabelle Mary (1873 – 1929) and Lilian Ethel (1875 – 1952). [The couple later had a son, Arthur Reginald (1878 – 1961).]

It was about 1876 that Kathleen went to live with James Tissot at 17 (now 44), Grove End Road.

The Convalescent (c. 1876), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas; 30.2 by 39.06 in. (76.7 by 99.2 cm). Museums Sheffield. 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.

The Convalescent (1875/1876) was exhibited at the 1876 Royal Academy exhibition. It was offered for sale at Christies in 1881, but returned to the owner when the asking price was not received. It later was owned by Andrew Knowles, from whom it was purchased by the Fine Art Society in January 1949 from Christies for £241 10sh. [Andrew Knowles also owned Tissot’s In the Conservatory (Rivals), as of 1887.] Museums Sheffield purchased The Convalescent from the Fine Art Society in June 1949, and it remains in the collection there but is not on display.

The painting, which measures 30.2 by 39.06 in./76.7 by 99.2 cm, is set in Tissot’s garden at 17 (now 44) Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood, London. The model often is assumed to be Kathleen Newton, although Tissot scholar Michael Wentworth (1938-2002) identified her as a professional model Tissot painted in several pictures including Still on Top (c. 1873) and Chrysanthemums (c. 1874-76).

Incidentally, a different version of The Convalescent was sold at Christies in 1879. This may be the replica that measures 13 by 8 in./33.02 by 20.32 cm, sold by Christie’s, London in 1975 for $ 15,286/£ 6,500 and in 1982 by Christie’s, New York for $ 36,000/£ 21,368.

Reading the News (c. 1874), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 34 by 20 in./86.36 by 50.80 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Collectors of Tissot’s oil paintings tended to hold on to them in the decades after his death. However, in 1947, his exquisite Reading the News (34 by 20 in./86.36 by 50.80 cm) was sold at Christie’s, London for $ 1,168/£ 290 – surely a bargain, especially considering that, in 1989, it would sell at Sotheby’s, New York for $ 1,250,000/ £ 797,295!

Related blog posts:

Kathleen Newton by James Tissot: eight auctioned oil paintings

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

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

Was Cecil Newton James Tissot’s son?

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 in the era of Abstract Expressionism

July 14, 2014, 7:55 pm

≫ Next: James Tissot and the Revival of Victorian Art in the 1960s

≪ Previous: James Tissot in the 1940s: La Mystérieuse is identified

All auction 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.

Spending had ceased during World War II. But as they had even during the wartime years of recession, art museums continued to acquire James Tissot’s oil paintings.

Marguerite in Church (c. 1861), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 50 by 75 cm. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

In 1950, American-born international mining magnate Sir Alfred Chester Beatty (1875 – 1968) presented Marguerite in Church (1861), along with ninety-three other paintings, to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.

Museums in the continental United States acquired three more Tissot oils in the 1950s, for a grand total of seven.

London Visitors (c. 1874), by James Tissot. 63 by 45 in. (160 by 114.2 cm). Toledo Museum of Art, U.S. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

In 1951, James Tissot’s London Visitors was acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. It was purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, the gift of Edward Drummond Libbey (1854 – 1925). Libbey founded the Libbey Glass Company in Toledo in 1888 and the Toledo Museum of Art in 1901.

No.5/No.22 (1950), by Mark Rothko (Photo: Wikiart.org)

In 1952, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in Manhattan in 1929, held its ground-breaking exhibition, “Fifteen Americans,” including the work of Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) and Jackson Pollock (1912 – 1956). The show was followed in 1956 with “Twelve Americans” and in 1959 with “Sixteen Americans,” which introduced Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and Frank Stella (b. 1936) . But the most influential of MoMA’s exhibitions was “The New American Painting,” which toured Basel, Milan, Madrid, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and London from March 1958 to April 1959, establishing the importance of contemporary American art for an international audience. A London newspaper headline read, “The New American Painting Captures Europe.” Once home, the exhibition was shown at MoMA.

Number 29, by Jackson Pollok (Photo: Wikiart.org)

Woman I (1952), by Willem de Kooning. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

Woman V (1952-53), by Willem de Kooning. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Willem de Kooning (1904 – 1997), introduced to Europe in “The New American Painting,” began to explore the subject of women exclusively by 1950.

De Kooning completed Woman I (Museum of Modern Art, New York) in 1952.

When his work was shown in New York in 1953, it caused a sensation, in part because his images were figurative rather than abstract.

Despite the mark being made by Abstract Expressionism and the fact that figurative art was passé, the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield, England, held “James Tissot (1836-1902): An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Etchings,” from May 28 to June 26, 1955.

Immediately after, from July 16 to November 12, 1955, “Paintings, Drawings and Etchings by James Tissot, 1836-1902, Selected from an Exhibition Arranged by the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield,” toured various U.K. venues: the Bolton Art Gallery; Bristol City Art Gallery; Birmingham City Art Gallery; and Cartwright Memorial Hall in Bradford, West Yorkshire.

In the Conservatory (Rivals), c. 1875, by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 15 1/8 x 20 1/8 in. (38.4 x 51.1 cm). (Photo: Wikiart.org). This painting, de-accessioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, in 2013, last was exhibited publicly in 1955.

Other Tissot oil paintings were desirable enough to private collectors to change hands during this time. Waiting for the ferry outside the Falcon Inn (1874) sold at Christie’s, London in 1954 for $ 4,339/£ 1,550. The Cab Road, Victoria Station (also known as Departure Platform, Victoria Station, 1895), was sold at Sotheby’s, London, in early 1954, and then to J. Spencer in 1955.

Waiting for the ferry outside the Falcon Inn (1874), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 26 by 37 in. (66.04 by 93.98 cm). The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

The Cab Road, Victoria Station (also known as Departure Platform, Victoria Station, 1895), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 23 by 12 in. (58.42 by 30.48 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikiart)

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Wall Street magnate John Langeloth Loeb (1902-1996) and his wife, Frances “Peter” Lehman Loeb (1907-1996), former New York City Commissioner to the United Nations, began to form what would become, over the next four decades, one of the greatest private collections of art in the United States. The Loebs bought paintings from well-known New York dealers, especially Knoedler and Company, and at auctions in New York and abroad. They displayed them in their Park Avenue apartment, which they opened to curators as well as art historians and their students.

The Loebs acquired James Tissot’s La cheminée (The Fireplace, c. 1869) from Knoedler and Company on January 31, 1955 and Dans la serre (In the Conservatory, 1867-69) from The Fine Arts Society, London on October 7, 1957. Both paintings almost certainly depict the interior of Tissot’s sumptuous villa on the avenue de l’impératrice (now avenue Foch) in Paris, which he moved into in early 1868.

La cheminée/The Fireplace (c. 1869), by James Tissot. 20 by 13 in. (50.80 by 33.02 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Dans la serre (In the Conservatory, by James Tissot. (1867-69), 28 x 16 in. (71.12 x 40.64 cm.). Courtesy www.jamestissot.org

Dans la serre/In the Conservatory (1867-69), by James Tissot. 28 x 16 in. (71.12 x 40.64 cm). Private Collection. Courtesy http://www.jamestissot.org

When the Loeb Collection of twenty-nine French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, drawings and sculptures by twenty-one artists including Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Gauguin, van Gogh and Picasso was sold at Christie’s, New York in 1997, it brought $92.7 million. Dans la Serre (In the Conservatory, 1867-69) brought $ 440,000/£ 270,986 and La Cheminée (The Fireplace, c. 1869) was sold for $ 1,700,000/£ 1,046,991.

Hide and Seek (c. 1877), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 28 7/8 x 21 1/4 in. (73.4 x 53.9 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

In London, the Leicester Galleries, which had held two exhibitions of James Tissot’s work in the 1930s, held Exhibition of Works by James Tissot in 1957. Tissot’s oil paintings continued to sell at auction for bargain prices. In 1957, Hide and Seek (c. 1877) [in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. since 1978] sold at Christie’s, London for $ 2,379/£ 850.

In 1958, Tissot’s October (1878) [a scaled-down replica of Tissot’s Octobre (1877) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montréal, gift of Lord Strathcona and family, 1927] sold at Christie’s, London for $ 419/£ 150. In 1995, it set a record for the second-highest price paid for an oil painting by Tissot when it was sold by Sotheby’s, New York for $ 2,800,000/£ 1,775,185. [In 1994, Tissot’s The Garden Bench (1882) had sold at Sotheby's, New York for $ 4,800,000/£ 3,035,093.]

Women of Paris: The Circus Lover (also known as Amateur Circus, 1885), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 58 by 40 in. (147.3 by 1016 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Between 1883 and 1885, Tissot painted a series of fifteen large-scale pictures called La Femme à Paris (The Parisian Woman). They portrayed the fashionable parisienne in various incarnations using brighter, modern colors than he had in his previous work.

The Circus Lover (1885) was sold by Gerald M. Fitzgerald at Christie’s, London in mid-1957 to the Marlborough Fine Art Gallery for $ 3,219/£ 1,150. In early 1958, The Circus Lover was purchased from the Marlborough Fine Art by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts for $ 5,000 as Amateur Circus. By comparison, Edgar Degas’ Three dancers at a dancing class, (c.1888-90) sold for $ 61,599/£ 22,000 at Sotheby’s, London in 1959, when it was acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.

Women of Paris: The Women of the Chariots (c. 1883-85), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 57 ½ by 39 5/8” (146 by 100.65 cm). Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

The Women of the Chariots, also called The Circus, was exhibited in Paris in 1885 and in London in 1886 as Ces dames des chars (The Ladies of the Cars). It is the second in the La Femme à Paris series, painted sometime before mid-1884. The Women of the Chariots was sold by Julius H. Weitzner (1896 – 1986), a leading dealer in Old Master paintings in New York and London, to Walter Lowry, who gifted it to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1958. Now hanging in the RISD museum director’s office, The Women of the Chariots will be the centerpiece of “Circus,” an exhibition to be held from August 1, 2014 through February 22, 2015.

Three Flags (1958), by Jasper Johns. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (1959), by Frank Stella. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

In a decade of art defined by American Abstract Expressionism, private collectors continued to seek Tissot’s oil paintings. In 1959, an oil version of On the River (1876), measuring 33 by 19 in. (83.82 by 48.26 cm) sold at Sotheby’s, London for $ 615/£ 220. Another of Tissot’s medieval-style pictures, Marguerite at the well, (1861, oil on canvas, 50 by 40 in. /127.00 by 101.60 cm) sold at Sotheby’s, London that year for $ 1,819/£ 650. Such bargains were available throughout the next decade and beyond.

Related blogs:

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

James Tissot in the 1940s: La Mystérieuse is identified

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 and the Revival of Victorian Art in the 1960s

July 30, 2014, 5:37 pm

≫ Next: If only we’d bought James Tissot’s paintings in the 1970s!

≪ Previous: James Tissot in the era of Abstract Expressionism

The Waterfall, by J. E. Millais (1853). Delaware Museum.

The Waterfall, by J. E. Millais (1853). This picture at the Delaware Museum of Art shows John Ruskin’s wife, Effie, in Scotland the year before their marriage was annulled.

Victorian art wasn’t dead by the 1960s, just buried. It was accessible in the Pre-Raphaelite collections of Birmingham and Manchester, the collection at the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight, and specialized collections such as the Watts Gallery, Leighton House and the William Morris Gallery, among other galleries in the United Kingdom.

In the U.S., the Delaware Museum of Art boasted a collection of British nineteenth-century art bequeathed by the descendants of Wilmington textile mill owner Samuel Bancroft, Jr. (1840 – 1915) in 1935. Bancroft and his wife, Mary, had acquired the collection from 1880 to 1915, advised by the Pre-Raphaelite painter, collector and art dealer Charles Fairfax Murray (1849 – 1919).

The Blessed Damozel (1871-78), by D.G. Rossetti, Fogg Museum. Winthrop paid £ 630 for this painting in 1934.

American lawyer and banker Grenville L. Winthrop (1864 – 1943) collected French, British, and American art, including a signiﬁcant group of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Upon his death in 1943, Winthrop left his entire collection of more than 4,000 works of art, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel (1871-78) and Edward Burne-Jones’ Pan and Psyche (1872-1874) to the Fogg Museum at his alma mater, Harvard College.

But at London’s Tate Gallery, the Pre-Raphaelites were displayed in a small basement room next to the public lavatories.

Nevertheless, Victorian art was savored behind closed doors, by a few connoisseurs delighting in the imagery of a by-gone era. Generally, it was scorned by sophisticates from art historians to collectors as mawkish, old-fashioned rubbish. Collecting it was a cheap enough hobby for those with some spare cash.

British artist L.S. Lowry (1887 – 1976) began to collect paintings and drawings by Rossetti after his own work, featuring industrial landscapes with factory workers, started selling for large sums in the 1950s. Lowry was president of the Rossetti Society, a select group of Rossetti owners founded in 1966; the collection he left upon his death in 1976 is now at The Lowry in Salford Quays, in greater Manchester.

Music (1877), by Burne-Jones

Kerrison Preston (1884 – 1974), a Bournemouth solicitor, had formed an impressive collection of Victorian art in the 1930s. After his elderly daughter died at Oxford in 2006, Rossetti’s Hamlet and Ophelia (1866) was discovered in the kitchen of her small house, and Burne-Jones’ Music (1877) – which Preston had acquired after it sold at Christie’s in 1934 for £ 147 – was found in her sitting room. Both masterpieces, worth well over £ 1 million, entered the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 2008.

But to the public of the 1960s, these were unknown private collections.

Seeing the work of James Tissot remained a rare pleasure. As of 1960, there were only forty-eight oil paintings by James Tissot in public art collections worldwide: eighteen in the U.K., two in the Republic of Ireland, fifteen in France, seven in the U.S., one in Canada, one in India, two in New Zealand, and two in Australia.

There was only one couple who collected Tissot oils, as part of their collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, drawings and sculptures: Wall Street magnate John Langeloth Loeb (1902 – 1996) and his wife, Frances “Peter” Lehman Loeb (1907 – 1996), former New York City Commissioner to the United Nations. Since the late 1950s, the Loebs had been forming what would become, over the next four decades, one of the greatest private collections of art in the United States. They displayed their paintings in their Park Avenue apartment, which they opened to curators as well as art historians and their students.

July (Speciman of a Portrait) (1878), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 34 7/16 by 24 in. (87.5 by 61 cm). Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. (Photo: Wikimedia.org). In this version, a frizzy red hairstyle has been painted on the model; in the version called “Seaside,” now in a private collection, the model wears a tight blonde bun.

In 1960, Sir J.K. [John Kenyon] Vaughan-Morgan (1905 – 1995), a conservative Member of Parliament from Reigate, Surrey, from 1950 to 1970, sold Tissot’s Seaside to John L. Loeb as Ramsgate Harbour through the London art dealer, Thomas Agnew and Sons.

Loeb’s collection of twenty-nine paintings already included two Tissot oils; he had acquired La Cheminée (By the Fireside, c. 1869) in 1955 and Dans la serre (In the Conservatory, 1867-69) in 1957.]

A version of Seaside called July (Speciman of a Portrait) is on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Self portrait, c.1865 (oil on panel), 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.

Self portrait (c.1865), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 19 5/8 by 11 7/8 in. (49.8 x 30.2 cm). 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.

The Lady of Shalott (c. 1890-1905), by William Holman Hunt.

In 1961, Tissot’s Self-Portrait (c. 1865) was acquired by The California Palace of the Legion of Honour, San Francisco. This self-portrait shows him at 29, on the cusp of the spectacular success he would earn in Paris during the five years before the Franco-Prussian War broke out and he rebuilt his career in London. A hundred years later, his work was coming back into fashion – riding the breaking wave of interest in Victorian art.

The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, one of several museums that went against art trends, purchased William Holman Hunt’s Lady of Shalott (c. 1890 – 1905). It was purchased at Christie’s, London in June, 1961 for $ 26,599/£ 9,500.

That year, Agnew’s, London held an exhibition, Victorian Painting 1837-1887, in cooperation with the newly-founded Victorian Society.

The Finding of Moses, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Then there was Alma-Tadema’s The Finding of Moses (1904). It was purchased upon completion by Sir John Aird (1833 – 1911), the engineer who moved the Crystal Palace from Hyde Park to Sydenham and oversaw the construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt, for £ 5,250 (plus the artist’s expenses). Aird’s family sold the picture for £ 820 in 1935, and when it sold again in 1942, it fetched only £ 265. In 1960, the painting was put on sale by the Newman Gallery in London, and it didn’t even meet the reserve, or the confidential minimum price agreed upon between the owner and the auction house (in this case, known to be £ 252), so it did not sell.

By 1963, Charles Jerdein (1916 – 1999), a London art dealer and former thoroughbred trainer, pioneered the market for paintings by Alma-Tadema, but he somehow missed The Finding of Moses.

The Newman Gallery offered Alma-Tadema’s painting to any public gallery that would take it as a gift, but no one wanted it. Newman then sold it to the owners of the Clock House Restaurant in Hertfordshire, England, who later sold it to a dealer who sold it to another dealer, Ira Spanierman in New York, for $8,500. Spanierman would have been familiar with Alma-Tadema’s work, if only from the Robert Isaacson Gallery’s show in New York in 1962, “An Exhibition to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Death of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1836-1912.” Spanierman sold The Finding of Moses in August, 1967 to American television celebrity Allen Funt (1914 – 1999) for $25,000, and Funt was to buy nearly thirty more Alma-Tadema paintings from him.

The American Abstract Expressionism that dominated the art market in the 1950s would soon cede to new art movements. Godfrey Pilkington (1918 – 2007), director of London’s Piccadilly Gallery from 1953 to 2007, hated abstract art, preferring “something not totally unconnected with the old-fashioned concept of beauty.” He observed that buyers were “nervous of buying something that they actually like,” investing instead in “pictures they don’t like because they’ve been told they are good.” He later noted, “Art was becoming big business and, what is more, it was becoming publicity business.”

Pilkington was not the only art dealer in London who was not an aficionado of the contemporary art vogue, or who was more interested in Victorian art even though the market for Victorian art was almost nonexistent.

Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting (1860), by William Dyce.

Charlotte and Robert Frank, refugees from Nazi Germany, set up as dealers in St. James’s, London, in the early 1940s, specializing in Victorian art. In 1947, Robert Frank [who was the uncle of diarist Anne Frank] bought John Martin’s The Last Judgment (1853), which had been cut into four strips to decorate a screen, and restored it. Upon her death in 1974, Charlotte left the work to the Tate in memory of her husband, along with another Martin work that Robert had purchased in 1947, The Plains of Heaven (1851-53); her bequest reunited a monumental triptych that included Martin’s The Great Day of his Wrath (1851-53), which the Tate had purchased in 1945. After Robert Frank passed away in 1953, Charlotte Frank, working from a tiny room in a basement in St. James’s Street, became renowned for her percipience. In 1964, she bought William Dyce’s Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting (1860) at Christie’s, London, and sold it to Sir David Montagu Douglas Scott (1887 – 1986), a career diplomat, a year later for £ 950. The Sir David and Lady Scott Collection of two hundred forty-two 19^th and 20^th century works, begun in 1914 and continually growing, adorned the walls of the Scott’s home, the Dower House at Boughton House, Northamptonshire. When it was auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2008, Dyce’s celebrated picture sold for $ 816,800/£ 541,250 (including buyer’s premium) to a foreign buyer. An export ban was put on it by the U.K. government, and in 2010, National Museum Wales secured it for £ 557,218 with a mix of grants, donations and gifts.

In December 1960, 32-year-old British art dealer Jeremy Maas (1928 – 1997) left Bonhams auction house and, with a capital of £ 2,000, opened his own gallery in Clifford Street, Mayfair, to specialize in Victorian paintings.

Just before Christmas in 1961, Maas held his first Pre-Raphaelite exhibition, “The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Contemporaries,” the first commercial showing of the Pre-Raphaelites in the 20th century. The show featured one hundred twenty-six drawings and thirteen paintings, some of which were purchased by major museums and galleries, including the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Maas began to educate his customers about Victorian artists even as Andy Warhol’s iconic, silkscreened Campbell’s Soup Can paintings ushered in the Pop Art movement.

Flaming June (1895), by Frederic Leighton. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

A few years later, in 1963, a teenager named Andrew Lloyd Webber spotted Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Flaming June (1895) – dirty and unframed – in a Fulham Road shop window. He had been interested in Victorian art since he was eight years old, but the price tag read £ 50. “I was 15. I didn’t have £ 50,” he later said, “I’ve been kicking myself ever since.” He asked his grandmother if he could borrow the money to buy it, but she replied, “I will not have Victorian junk in my flat.” Flaming June was put up for auction but failed to sell for its reserve price [the equivalent of $140 USD]. Jeremy Maas bought it in 1963 for £ 1,000, a very high price at the time, from a man who had bought it from his barber for £ 60. Unable to sell the painting to a British institution or collector, Maas finally persuaded Luis Ferré to buy it for £ 2,000, for his new museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico.

In the Louvre (L’Esthetique, 1883-1885), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 58 by 39 3/8 in. (144.4 by 100.0 cm). Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Luis A. Ferré (1904 – 2003), a Puerto Rican industrialist, politician, patron of the arts and philanthropist, had traveled to Europe in 1956 and acquired art including many Pre-Raphaelite works. Ferré would state in an interview published in Forbes magazine in 1993 that ”everyone thought I was crazy” to buy Pre-Raphaelite art in the 1950s. On January 3, 1959, with seventy-two works of art, Ferré opened an art museum in a small wooden house in his birthplace of Ponce which became the extraordinary Museo de Arte de Ponce (Ponce Museum of Art). The museum’s renowned collection of Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian art includes James Tissot’s In the Louvre (L’Esthetique, 1883-1885), which was purchased at Sotheby’s, London in April, 1959 for $ 2,099/£ 750 and entered the Ponce’s collection in 1962. Ferré also purchased Burne-Jones’ 1898 masterpiece, The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, at auction at Christie’s in 1963.

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (c. 1881–1898), by Edward Burne-Jones. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Tissot’s work entered several museums in the U.S. and Canada at this time.

In 1963, prominent collector Mrs. Blakemore Wheeler gifted Tissot’s Waiting for the ferry outside the Falcon Tavern (1874), which had sold for $ 4,339/£ 1,550 at Christie’s, London in 1954, to the Speed Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.

Waiting for the ferry outside the Falcon Inn (1874), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 26 by 37 in. (66.04 by 93.98 cm). The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Gentleman in a Railway Carriage (1872) was purchased for the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts by the Alexander and Caroline Murdock de Witt Fund in 1965.

The Letter (c. 1878), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 71.4 x 107.1 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, sold for $ 279 USD/£ 100 GBP at Christie’s, London in 1960 – and for $ 2,288,250 USD/£ 1,500,000 GBP at the same auction house in 1993. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

From 1953 until her death, The Letter (c. 1878) belonged to The Hon. Mrs. Nellie Ionides, née Samuel (1883 – 1962), eldest daughter of Shell Oil magnate Sir Marcus Samuel (later the 1^st Viscount Bearsted), friend of Queen Mary, and a renowned London collector and connoisseur. It was sold with her estate in May 1963, by Sotheby’s, London to P. Claas (London) for $ 5,319/£ 1,900. In April, 1964, The Letter was purchased by New York art dealer James Coats, who immediately sold it to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. [Coats, incidentally, was British and dealt privately out of his art-filled New York apartment, where Alma-Tadema's decadent, seven-foot The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888) hung over his bed. He lent a number of works to exhibitions at Robert Isaacson’s New York gallery, such as “Poetic Painters of the XIX Century” from December 1960 through January 1961, "Painters of the Beautiful" (Leighton, Albert Moore, Whistler, and Charles Conder) in 1964, and Simeon Solomon in 1966.]

In March, 1964, the new, and short-lived Gallery of Modern Art was opened in Manhattan by billionaire playboy Huntington Hartford (1911 – 2008), an heir to the A&P supermarket fortune.

Brillo Soap Pads Box (1964), by Andy Warhol.

Hartford, who loathed Abstract Expressionism, had just published Art or Anarchy? How the Extremists and Exploiters Have Reduced the Fine Arts to Chaos and Commercialism. In promoting the book, Doubleday noted that Hartford “challenges the artists, dealers, critics, and curators who have, in his view, blatantly duped the public for half a century.” He built the museum to house his extensive collection of 19th- and 20th-century representational art, which included paintings by Géricault, Courbet, Corot, Boudin, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gustave Doré, J.M.W. Turner, Constable, Landseer, Millais, Burne‐Jones, Cassatt and John Singer Sargent. The gallery closed in 1969, at a $7.4 million loss, and the collection was dispersed.

In July, 1964, James Tissot’s niece, Jeanne Tissot (b. 1876), died, eccentric and impoverished. In November, the remaining contents of the Château de Buillon in Besançon, France, where they had lived together prior to his death in 1902, were auctioned off, the artist’s last mementoes dispersed to various private collectors.

It was in 1964 that a successful Canadian couple, Joey and Toby Tanenbaum, began collecting Victorian paintings to decorate their new English-style home in Toronto. [Joey Tanenbaum (born 1932), the son of Polish immigrants who made their fortune in steel fabrication, is Chairman and CEO of Jay-M Enterprises Ltd. and Jay-M Holdings and has built his fortune through real estate and hydroelectric power.] But based on expert advice at that time, the Tanenbaums shifted their interest to “neglected” French artists of the same period. In February, 1968, they purchased James Tissot’s L’escalier (The Staircase, 1869) from art dealer James Coats in New York.

L’escalier (The Staircase, 1869), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 22 by 15 in. (55.88 by 38.10 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

Croquet (c. 1878), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 35.4 by 20 in. (89.8 by 50.8 cm). Art Gallery of Hamilton (Photo credit: Wikimedia.org)

Canadians seemed to have a special appreciation for Tissot’s work. In 1965, Croquet (c. 1878) was gifted to the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, by Dr. and Mrs. Basil Bowman in memory of their daughter, Suzanne. Dr. Bowman (1902 – 1971), a dermatologist who practiced in Brockville, Hamilton, and Owen Sound, was a member of the board of management of the Art Gallery of Hamilton. The Convalescent (1872, also called A Girl in an Armchair) was a gift to the Art Gallery of Ontario from R.B.F. Barr, Esq., Q.C., in 1966. The Shop Girl (1883 – 1885) was a gift to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, from the Corporations’ Subscription Fund, in 1968.

British novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903 – 1966), became a collector of art and a connoisseur of Victorian pictures. Waugh, who was related by marriage to Pre-Raphaelite painters William Holman Hunt and Thomas Woolner, published his first book, Rossetti: His Life and Works, in 1928. Works he displayed in his home included Rossetti’s Woman Holding a Dog (c. 1860) and Spirit of the Rainbow (1876), a life-sized nude for which he paid £10 in 1938, and Holman Hunt’s Oriana. Upon Waugh’s death in 1966, his collection was dispersed.

London Visitors (c. 1874), by James Tissot. This painting, acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio from London art dealer Robert Frank in 1951, was exhibited in Ottawa in 1965 and in Rhode Island and Toronto in 1968. (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

Other museums began to act on the growing interest in Victorian art. There was an exhibition of the Pre-Raphaelites at the Herron Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1964, which then became the first loan exhibition at the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art in New York. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa held “Paintings and Drawings by Victorian Artists in England” in 1965, which became a loan exhibition at The Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, Florida in 1966. Numerous early Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite paintings were included in the exhibition, “Romantic Art in Britain: Paintings and Drawings 1760-1860,” in Detroit and Philadelphia in 1968, and that year, the Mappin Art Gallery in Sheffield held “Victorian Painting.” The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool held closely researched exhibitions of Ford Madox Brown in 1964 and William Holman Hunt in 1969. The first major John Everett Millais retrospective since 1898 was held in 1967 at the Walker and the Royal Academy. “Paintings and Drawings from the Leathart Collection” was held at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1968; James Leathart (1820-1895) was a Newcastle lead manufacturer and a patron of artists who included James McNeill Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites.

A Passing Storm (c. 1876), by James Tissot. (Photo: Wikiart). This painting, exhibited in Rhode Island in 1968, is in the collection of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. It is now part of an exhibition called “Masterworks from the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.” It will be on view in Calgary, Alberta from May-August, 2014; in Manitoba from September-December, 2014; in Ottawa, Ontario in the summer of 2015; and in St. John’s, Newfoundland in the summer of 2016.

During February and March, 1968, the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence held “James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836 – 1902): A Retrospective Exhibition,” featuring thirty-nine of Tissot’s oils. The show traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto during April and May.

Also in 1968, petroleum geologist Robert Sumpf (1917 – 1994) gifted Tissot’s Promenade on the Ramparts (1864) to Stanford University in California, where he had earned his B.S. in geology in 1941.

Throughout the decade, other art dealers began to realize the potential in Victorian art.

Salthouse Dock, Liverpool (1892), by John Atkinson Grimshaw. A Northumberland couple bought this painting for £100 in 1960 and sold it for £185,000 in 2010. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

From the mid-1960s, Sir Robert Abdy, 5th Baronet (1896 – 1976) and Lady Jane Abdy (b. 1934) promoted the undervalued work of James Tissot and John Atkinson Grimshaw from the Ferrers Gallery, which they established at 9 Piccadilly Arcade, London after their marriage in 1962. Sir Robert inherited a large fortune which allowed him to live as a connoisseur and collector; he spent two years studying eighteenth-century furniture at the Louvre. (Since 1991, Lady Jane Abdy has been director of the Bury Street Gallery in South Kensington, London.)

Julian Hartnoll, one of the first dealers involved in the re-evaluation of Pre-Raphaelite art, established his art gallery in St. James in 1968, specializing in Victorian and Modern British Art. (Hartnoll is still at it, in his gallery at 37 Duke Street.)

Christopher Wood (1941 – 2009) joined Christie’s immediately on coming down from Cambridge in 1963. He started with six months on the front counter, picking up knowledge of art and prices from specialists, and a vacancy allowed him to work in the picture department, where he affixed photographs to cards and filed them. Wood was fascinated by Victorian artists, especially the Pre-Raphaelites, and he was convinced that “Victorian art was like a huge submerged continent waiting to be rediscovered.” By age 27, he was appointed a director in the European and British Nineteenth-Century Paintings Department. There were no separate Victorian sales until July 1968, with a sale that brought in a total of £ 74,000.

About this time, a casually dressed man about twenty years old, with dark hair down to his shoulders, introduced himself to Christopher Wood as Andrew Lloyd Webber. He was interested in the Pre-Raphaelites, and as he later said, “At that time it was deeply unfashionable to like them, which gave them added spice.” He had bought his first picture, a Rossetti drawing, a few years earlier for £ 12.

Ophelia (1894), by John William Waterhouse. (Photo: Wikimedia.org). In 1968, this painting sold at auction for $ 1,007 USD/£ 420 GBP; in 2000, it sold for $ 2,253,300 USD/£ 1,500,000 GBP.

Copiously illustrated books, including Graham Reynolds’ Victorian Painting (1966), Quentin Bell’s Victorian Artists (1967), and Jeremy Maas’ Victorian Painters (1969), fueled interest in the art of this long-ignored period.

In 1969, on spring break during his freshman year in college, Christopher (Kip) Forbes, of the American business magazine publishing dynasty, happened upon Graham Reynold’s Victorian Painting in a Bermuda bookshop. Just nineteen years old, Kip persuaded his father, Malcolm Forbes (1919 – 1990), “that for the price we had paid for a single late Monet [one in the Water Lilies series], we could have a collection of British Victorian paintings unrivaled in America outside a few museums.”

The collection of over 360 works of Victorian art that Kip Forbes and his father began in 1969 would include one well-known painting by James Tissot.

In 2003, The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art came up for auction and fetched £ 17 million. Later that year, London’s Royal Academy showed “Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters: the Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection,” an exhibition featuring some 200 paintings by artists including Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, Waterhouse Alma-Tadema and James Tissot.

Special thanks to

Helena Gómez de Córdoba

Exhibitions Coordinator and Curatorial Assistant, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico

Related posts:

James Tissot in the 1940s: La Mystérieuse is identified

James Tissot in the era of Abstract Expressionism

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 only we’d bought James Tissot’s paintings in the 1970s!

August 14, 2014, 6:02 pm

≫ Next: James Tissot’s popularity boom in the 1980s

≪ Previous: James Tissot and the Revival of Victorian Art in the 1960s

By 1970, the revival of interest in the Victorians and their art had been under way for only a decade, and many of those most closely involved with it were quite young.

In 1971, Sotheby’s of London introduced a new division, Sotheby’s Belgravia, devoted exclusively to the sale of Victorian art. Peter Nahum (b. 1947), who began his career at Sotheby’s in 1966, initiated the new division from the age of 24. [A leading expert in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Nahum left Sotheby's in 1984 to open The Leicester Galleries, in St. James's, London, and he now works independently, advising major private collections and museums worldwide.]

Christopher Wood (1941 – 2009), who joined Christie’s immediately on coming down from Cambridge in 1963, was appointed a director in the European and British Nineteenth-Century Paintings Department by age 27. The first separate Victorian art sale was in July 1968. Wood published Dictionary of Victorian Painters in 1971, when he was 30.

Scholarly studies on James Tissot in this decade contributed greatly to what we know about him today.

Willard Erwin Misfeldt (b. 1930) incorporated a significant amount of new information about the artist in his Ph.D. dissertation, “James Jacques Tissot: A Bio-critical Study,” Washington University, 1971. Dr. Misfeldt, a professor of Art History at Bowling Green State University in Ohio from 1967 to 2001, was the first scholar to visit the Château de Buillon in Besançon, France, the family home where the artist had lived prior to his death in 1902.

Michael Justin Wentworth (1938 – 2002) was born in Detroit, Michigan. He purchased his first prints by James Tissot in 1957, and he received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1962 and his M.F.A. there in 1964. Wentworth gained a reputation as an authority on Tissot by contributing to “James Jacques Joseph Tissot, 1836-1902: A Retrospective Exhibition” at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, and the Art Gallery of Toronto, in 1968. From 1968 to 1969 he was Assistant Director at the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts, and from 1971 to 1974 he served as Director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. In 1976, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His dissertation, “James Tissot: A Critical Study of His Life and Work, Together with a Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints,” served as the basis for James Tissot: Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints, published by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) in 1978. The release of the catalogue was accompanied by an exhibition of the same name at the MIA. Wentworth, at 40, now was established as the world’s leading Tissot scholar.

“Good bye” – On the Mersey, by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 33 by 21 in. (83.82 by 53.34 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

Meanwhile, Princeton student Christopher (Kip) Forbes, with his father Malcolm Forbes (1919 – 1990) of the American business magazine publishing dynasty, began amassing a large collection of Victorian art in 1969.

Kip wrote that by early 1970, when he was 20, “we were buying at a fairly dizzying clip,” and it was his father who purchased several “must have” paintings at Christie’s in 1970, including James Tissot’s ‘Good bye’ – On the Mersey, at prices which far exceeded their agreed-upon limits. Kip prepared the catalogue of his growing collection of Victorian paintings as his senior thesis for the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton. He had collected sixty-nine paintings by 1975, saying, “I like pictures where I don’t need a psychoanalyst to tell me about what’s in it.” The Forbes Collection, which eventually included 361 works by Holman Hunt, Millais and Rossetti, as well as G.F. Watts, Albert Moore and James Tissot, was displayed at Old Battersea House, the Forbes’ London home, a Queen Anne mansion overlooking the Thames. The collection was open to group tours, and selections from it were exhibited in venues including Tokyo, Mexico City, and Boston.

The Bunch of Lilacs, by James Tissot.

Kip Forbes found that in the early 1970s, the greatest Pre-Raphaelite painting or work by Frederic, Lord Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Albert Moore or James Tissot could be bought for $15,000. In fact, in 1975, Tissot’s gorgeous The Bunch of Lilacs (c. 1875) was sold at Christie’s, London for $15,249/£ 7,000. In 1976, Tissot’s Faust and Marguerite in the Garden (1861) sold at Christie’s, London for $ 10,123/£ 5,000.

Forbes soon had a few competitors, including the billionaire American playboy Huntington Hartford (1911 – 2008), an heir to the A&P supermarket fortune, as well as Americans buyers Edmund and Suzanne McCormick, and a Canadian couple, Joey and Toby Tanenbaum.

La Mondaine (The Woman of Fashion), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 58 by 40 in. (147.32 by 101.60 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org) In 1993, La Mondaine was sold at Sotheby’s, New York for $ 800,000 USD/£ 553,824 GBP.

Joey Tanenbaum (born 1932), the son of Polish immigrants who made their fortune in steel fabrication, is Chairman and CEO of Jay-M Enterprises Ltd. and Jay-M Holdings (Toronto, Ontario) and has built his fortune through real estate and hydroelectric power. He and his wife, Toby, are among the top five collectors in Canada, and they are major supporters of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Canadian Opera Company, the AGO, and the Royal Ontario Museum.

www-jamestissot-org, Study-For-'Le-Sphinx'-(Woman-In-An-Interior)

Study for “Le Sphinx,” by James Tissot. Private Collection. Courtesy http://www.jamestissot.org

In the 1970s, when appreciation for Victorian painting was just beginning to grow, the Tanenbaums made a hobby of collecting rediscovered masterpieces of English and French academic painting, and it became nearly a full-time effort. Among the Tanenbaums’ early purchases were pictures from James Tissot’s La Femme à Paris (The Parisian Woman) series, fifteen large-scale pictures painted in Paris between 1883 and 1885. They portrayed the fashionable parisienne in various incarnations using brighter, modern colors than Tissot had used in his previous work.

The Tanenbaums bought La Mondaine (The Woman of Fashion) in 1970, Study for Le Sphinx (Woman in Interior) in 1973, and Sans Dot (Without Dowry) in 1975, all from the Herman Shickman Gallery in New York. In 1978, The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa held “The Other Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph M. Tanenbaum.”

Sans dot (Without Dowry, 1883-85), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 58 by 41 in. (147.32 by 104.14 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org) Sans Dot was sold at Sotheby’s, New York in 1993 for $ 800,000 USD/£ 553,824 GBP.

In Dobbs Ferry, New York, Suzanne McCormick (born 1936) and her husband, Edmund J. McCormick (1912 – 1988), a business executive, management consultant and philanthropist, collected American paintings before they began to buy 19^th century British/Victorian paintings in 1976. The McCormick collection included works by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Burne-Jones, John Atkinson Grimshaw, William Holman Hunt, Arthur Hughes, Frederic Leighton, John Everett Millais, Albert Moore, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Singer Sargent, James Tissot, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and others. Edmund McCormick was a friend of Christopher Forbes, and each of them would write “most wanted” lists of Victorian paintings to add to their respective collections. The McCormicks displayed their collection at Norcross, their house overlooking the Hudson River designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but their paintings also were widely exhibited.

In 1976, Christopher Wood published Victorian Panorama: Paintings of Victorian Life, and he left Christie’s to open his own gallery in Motcomb Street. The McCormicks purchased Tissot’s Going to Business (Going to the City, 1879) from the Christopher Wood Gallery in 1977. [After her husband’s death in 1988, Mrs. McCormick, a former pianist, sold a portion of the collection at Sotheby's, New York in 1990. Going to Business sold for $ 180,000/£ 106,559.]

Going to Business (Going to the City, 1879), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 17.25 by 10 in. (43.8 by 25.4 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

The Morning Ride, by James Tissot. Private Collection.

Interestingly, the work of James Tissot is half-French, half-British. While he was increasingly in the spotlight now shining on the Victorian painters, he still was folded in with the Impressionists. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held its exhibition, “Impressionist Epoch,” from December 12, 1974 to February 10, 1975, James Tissot’s The Morning Ride, which he painted in London between 1872 and 1876, was included.

Six more Tissot oils entered public collections in the 1970s.

Tissot gave A Civic Procession Descending Ludgate Hill, London (c. 1879, oil on canvas, 84.5 by 43 in./214.6 by 109.2 cm), previously called The Lord Mayor’s Show, to the Curator of the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris. The painting was purchased by the Corporation of London through S.C. L’Expertise, Paris, from the curator’s granddaughter, Mme. Léonce Bénédite, in 1972 and is now in the collection of the Guildhall Art Gallery. It is not currently on view.

Portrait of Eugène Coppens de Fontenay (1867), by James Tissot. 27 by 15 in. (68.58 by 38.10 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Lucy Paquette.

In 1867, James Tissot painted Portrait of Eugène Coppens de Fontenay (1824 –1896), the president of the exclusive Jockey Club in Paris. The portrait remained in the family until 1971, when it was sold at Christie’s, London for $ 4,352/£ 1,800. Seven months later, the small but arresting portrait was with the Herman Shickman Gallery, New York, before being purchased by the City of Philadelphia with the W. P. Wilstach Fund in 1972. It is on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Gallery 151 on the first floor (European Art 1850-1900).

On the Thames, A Heron (c. 1871-72), by James Tissot. 36 1/2 by 23 3/4 in. (92.71 by 60.33 cm). Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota, U.S. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

On the Thames, A Heron (c. 1871-1872) is one of Tissot’s first paintings after his move from Paris to London in June, 1871 – and it was the first on record to be sold at auction in England. Calculated to appeal to Victorian tastes, this Japanese-influenced scene was owned by wealthy Spanish banker José de Murrieta. Murrieta tried to sell the painting on May 24, 1873 as On the Thames: the frightened heron; priced at 570 guineas, it did not find a buyer. His brother, Antonio de Murrieta, attempted and failed to sell it on June 15, 1873 for 260 guineas. As The Heron (35 by 23 in./88.90 by 58.42 cm), the painting was sold at Sotheby’s, New York in 1973 for $ 32,000 USD/£ 12,886 GBP. On the Thames, A Heron was the gift of collector Mrs. Patrick Butler, by exchange in 1975, to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

At the Rifle Range (1869), by James Tissot. 26 ½ by 18 ¾ in. (67.3 by 47.6). Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, U.K. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

At the Rifle Range (1869) was offered for sale by the London banker Murrieta at Christie’s, London in 1883 as The Crack Shot, for £220.10s but failed to find a buyer at that price. In 1934, it again was offered for sale at Christie’s, sold as The Rifle Range to prominent art dealer Arthur Tooth for £52.10s. By 1936, it was at the Leicester Galleries in London, where it was purchased by Captain Bambridge the following year. Captain George Bambridge (1892 – 1943), a British diplomat, was married to Rudyard Kipling’s daughter, Elsie (1896 – 1976). Between 1933 and 1937, George and Elsie lived at Burgh House in Hampstead. From 1938, the childless couple resided at Wimpole Hall, about 8½ miles (14 kilometres) southwest of Cambridge. Since Elsie Bambridge’s death in 1976, the estate has been owned by the National Trust and is open to the public. Click here to see At the Rifle Range in this virtual tour of Mrs. Bambridge’s study – and if you look closely, you’ll also see a Tissot oil painting of his mistress and muse Kathleen Newton (1854 – 1882) on the wall to the left of At the Rifle Range. It’s A Study for “By Water”: Kathleen Kelly, Mrs. Isaac Newton, c. 1880 (oil on panel, 12 ¼ by 10 in. /31.1 by 25.4 cm).

Hide and Seek (1877), by James Tissot. 28 7/8 by 21 1/4 in. /73.4 by 53.9 cm. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 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

Hide and Seek (1877) shows Kathleen Newton reading in his studio while her nieces and children play at his spacious home at 17 (now 44), Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood. The painting was sold at Christie’s, London in 1957 for $ 2,379/£ 850, then at Sotheby’s, London in 1963 for $ 6,159/£ 2,200. Mrs. C. Behr, London, owned it until at least 1967, after which it belonged to Julian Spiro, Esq. In 1976, it was sold at Christie’s, London for $ 33,002/£ 20,000, and in 1978, Hide and Seek was purchased from the Herman Shickman Gallery, New York with the Chester Dale Fund by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

One morning in 1979, as staff was arriving at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, a man approached them saying he had a rare and valuable painting by French painter James Tissot that he wished to sell them. When they told the museum director of this claim, he reacted with disbelief and was inclined to send the man away. The painting, worth £ 30,000, was Tissot’s portrait of Mrs. Catherine Smith Gill and Two of her Children (1877). It was one of the largest works the artist ever had produced.

Portrait of Mrs Catherine Smith Gill and Two of her Children (1877), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 60.04 by 39.96 in. (152.5 by 101.5 cm.). Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

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. It is family lore that Tissot and Catherine developed “a mutual affinity,” though Kathleen Newton had been in his life (and residing at his St. John’s Wood home) for the past year or two.

The portrait was purchased, with the aid of contributions from the National Art Collections Fund and the Victoria and Albert Museum Purchase Grant Fund, from Berkeley Chapple Gill, grandson of Mrs. Gill – the son of the little boy in the painting – in 1979, and it remains on view at the Walker Art Gallery. Click here for an interactive view of it.

Related posts:

James Tissot in the 1940s: La Mystérieuse is identified

James Tissot in the era of Abstract Expressionism

James Tissot and the Revival of Victorian Art in the 1960s

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 popularity boom in the 1980s

August 31, 2014, 10:28 am

≫ Next: James Tissot in the Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection

≪ Previous: If only we’d bought James Tissot’s paintings in the 1970s!

Victorian art, which included the work of James Tissot, was rediscovered in the 1960s and quickly gained popularity in the 1970s – just in time for the Thatcher years, 1979 – 1990. Sydney Morning Herald columnist John McDonald wrote, “During that decade [the 1980s]…the new rich hastened to acquire all the trappings of wealth, and grand Victorian paintings were once again on the menu.”

But Victorian paintings weren’t popular only in the United Kingdom. American publishing magnate Malcolm Forbes (1919 – 1990), who with his college-age son, Kip, began collecting Victorian paintings in 1969, exhibited a portion of his collection in 1981: “32 Victorian Paintings from the Forbes Magazine Collection” at The Fine Art Society, Glasgow. The show included Tissot’s “Good-bye” – On the Mersey, which Malcolm Forbes had purchased at Christie’s, London, in 1970. ”The 80’s were a decade when businessmen were celebrities, and Malcolm fit into that well,” a colleague later observed.

Le banc de jardin/The Garden Bench (1882), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 99.1 by 142.2 cm. Private collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

American millionaire Frederick Koch (b. 1933) also began collecting Victorian paintings in the 1980s. One of four brothers and heirs to Koch Industries, the family oil conglomerate, Frederick sold his stake to two of his brothers for over $700 million in 1983. The Yale Drama graduate funded almost £ 2 million toward the full refurbishment of Shakespeare’s Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1980s, and he began collecting rare books, opera manuscripts, and fine art.

James Tissot’s Le banc de jardin/The Garden Bench (c. 1882) set an auction price record in 1983, when Fred Koch paid $ 803,660/£ 520,000 for it at Christie’s, London. This was a favorite image of Tissot’s, depicting his happy half-dozen years with his mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton (1854 – 1882), and her children in his garden; the artist kept it all his life.

Koch built a superb collection of Victorian paintings, which he intended for a museum in the heart of London by 1986. But he was refused permission by Westminster Council and English Heritage to turn historic St. John’s Lodge in Regent’s Park into a museum. He put the paintings, including Tissot’s L’Orpheline, in storage.

American oil executive and arts patron Charles B. Wrightsman (1895 – 1986), who used to entertain U.S. President John F. Kennedy at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, purchased Tissot’s Spring Morning (Matinée de printemps, c. 1875) at Sotheby’s, Belgravia for $ 89,972/£ 40,000 in 1981. Later that year, Mr. Wrightsman and his wife, Jayne (b. 1919) purchased In the Conservatory (The Rivals) from the Richard Green Gallery, London. In 1983, the Marquess of Bristol sold Tissot’s En plein soleil (c. 1881) to Stair Sainty Gallery, London, where it was purchased that year by the Wrightsmans. Upon Mr. Wrightsman’s death in 1986, the pictures became the sole property of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman.

In the spring of 1984, London’s Tate Gallery held “The Pre-Raphaelites,” the first comprehensive exhibition of their work. It turned Australian businessman John Schaeffer on to Victorian art. “It really opened my eyes,” he said. In the decades that followed, Schaeffer has continued to build his collection. “I have traditional tastes…and love narrative,” he has said. “I like beautiful things, and I don’t like modern or contemporary art.” Along with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Schaeffer is recognized as one of the world’s foremost collectors of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Entranced by the Pre-Raphaelites in London, 1984.

As an undergraduate, studying art history in London, I was mesmerized by the Tate’s Pre-Raphaelite exhibition and spent a great deal of time in the galleries. In fact, I completely missed The Barbican Art Gallery’s major exhibition, “James Tissot, 1836-1902” that year (the exhibition, curated by Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, included one hundred eighty-five works and travelled from London to the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris).

Four years later, in 1988, the Isetan Museum of Art in Tokyo, held James Tissot.

Though Tissot’s oil paintings were worth a great deal on the art market, five more entered public collections in the 1980s – all in the United States.

July (Speciman of a Portrait, 1878), by James Tissot. Oil on fabric, 34 7/16 by 24 in./87.5 by 61 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. (Photo: Wikimedia)

Tissot exhibited July (Speciman of a Portrait), along with nine other paintings, at London’s Grosvenor Gallery – a sumptuous, invitation-only showcase for contemporary art in New Bond Street – in 1878, the year it was painted. It is one in a series representing months of the year, and the figure is modeled by Kathleen Newton. At some point, another artist painted a frizzy red hairstyle (probably considered more up-to-date) on Mrs. Newton. In 1980, the painting was donated to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio at the bequest of Noah L. Butkin. It currently is on view in Gallery 220.

The Artists’ Ladies (1885), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 57 1/2 by 40 in. (146.1 by 101.6 cm). The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Shortly after Kathleen Newton died of tuberculosis in 1882, James Tissot left London and returned to Paris. During his eleven years in London, he had declined Edgar Degas’ invitation to show his work with the artists who became known as the Impressionists. Making his comeback in Paris in 1885, Tissot displayed a set of fifteen paintings at the Galerie Sedelmeyer called La Femme à Paris (The Parisian Woman).

One of them, The Artists’ Wives (also called The Artists’ Ladies, 1885) depicts a gathering of artists and their wives on Varnishing Day, the evening before the official opening of the Salon, the annual art exhibition in Paris at the Palais de l’Industrie.

By 1981, the painting was with M. Knoedler and Co. in New York. It was a gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and The Grandy Fund, Landmark Communications Fund, and “An Affair to Remember” to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1981. It is on view.

The Fan (1875), by James Tissot. 15 by 19 in. (38.10 by 48.26 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

The Fan (1875) simultaneously demonstrates Tissot’s facility depicting plant life, fashion, female beauty and japonisme. It was sold at Sotheby’s, London in 1982 for $ 73,974/£ 42,000 to Charles Jerdein (1916 – 1999). Jerdein was the trainer who officially received the credit when thoroughbred Gilles de Retz landed the 2,000 Guineas in 1956; the Jockey Club did not recognize the female trainer, Helen Johnson-Houghton. Jerdein left Mrs. Johnson-Houghton’s operation that year, trained on his own for a short time, then concentrated on his business as an art dealer in London, though he occasionally had a horse in training in Newmarket. By the early 1960s, Jerdein had pioneered the market for paintings by James Tissot’s friend, the Dutch-born Victorian painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836 – 1912), before Alma-Tadema’s name became associated with the American television personality who collected his work, Allen Funt of “Candid Camera.”

Shortly after he purchased it, Jerdein sold The Fan to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, which was able to acquire it due to the generosity of The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund. In 2013, The Fan was in the Mississippi Museum of Art’s “Old Masters to Monet” exhibition, one of fifty master works of French art spanning three centuries from the Wadsworth’s collection. The Fan next was on display at the Denver Art Museum’s exhibition, “Court to Café: Three Centuries of French Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum,” during the winter of 2013 – 2014. The painting is not currently on display at the Wadsworth.

Study for “Mrs. Newton with a Child by a Pool” (c. 1877-78). Oil on mahogany panel, 12 ¾ by 16 ¾ in. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, RIchmond, VA. (Photo: flickr)

Study for “Mrs. Newton with a Child by a Pool” (c. 1877-78) depicts Kathleen Irene Ashburnham Kelly Newton in the garden of Tissot’s home in St. John’s Wood, London. It was given to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond, Virginia by the American collectors and philanthropists Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon in 1983. It usually is on view, but the gallery it is in is closed for repairs through the next few months.

Young Women looking at Japanese articles, 1869 (oil on canvas) by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836-1902); 27 3/4 by 19 3/4 in. (70.5 by 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

Tissot had left his home in Nantes, a seaport on the west coast of France, at age 19 in 1855. In Paris, the young artist started out renting a succession of student rooms in the Latin Quarter. With his increasing success, he began a collection of Japanese art and objets, and by late 1867 or early 1868, he moved into a villa he had built on the prestigious avenue de l’Impératrice (now avenue Foch). [Read more about Tissot's villa here.]

In 1869, Tissot assimilated pieces from his art collection into elegant compositions in three similar paintings featuring young women looking at Japanese objects in his villa’s lavish interiors filled with Oriental carpets, furniture, fabrics, carvings, vases and wall hangings.

By the 1930s, the version above 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.

One public collection, also in the U.S., de-accessioned a Tissot oil in this decade. The Newark Museum, in Newark, New Jersey, sold Sur la Tamise (Return from Henley), which it had received from a donor in 1926. To benefit the museum’s acquisition fund, the picture was sold at Sotheby’s, New York in 1985 for $ 370,000/£ 293,860.

Scholars enhanced interest in Tissot’s life and work during the 1980s. In 1982, Tissot scholar Willard E. Misfeldt (b. 1930) published The Albums of James Tissot, a partial record of Tissot’s work from available photograph albums that the artist maintained. The catalogue from the Barbican’s 1984 Tissot exhibition, edited by curator Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, included eight scholarly essays on Tissot and varying aspects of his art as well as images of and commentary on the works displayed. Michael Wentworth (1938 – 2002), who had established himself as the world’s leading Tissot scholar by 1978, published the most comprehensive biography of Tissot to date, James Tissot, in 1984. Two years later, Victorian art expert Christopher Wood (1941 – 2009), published Tissot: The Life and Work of Jacques Joseph Tissot, 1836-1902.

The Return from the Boating Trip (1873), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, oil on panel, 24 by 17 in. (60.96 by 43.18 cm). Private Collection. Courtesy http://www.jamestissot.org

Dozens of Tissot oils changed hands during from 1980-89:

The Return from the Boating Trip (1873) was sold at Christie’s, London in 1982 for $ 31,852/£ 20,000.

The Bunch of Lilacs (c. 1875), by James Tissot. 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

The Bunch of Lilacs (c. 1875), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 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

The Bunch of Lilacs (1875) was sold at Christie’s, London in 1975 for $ 15,249/£ 7,000. In 1982, it was sold again by the same auction house for $ 134,235/£ 75,000.

Algernon Moses Marsden (1877), by James Tissot. 19 by 29 in./48.26 by 73.66 cm. Private collection. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tissot’s 1877 Portrait of Algernon Moses Marsden, which, was sold by Sotheby’s, London in 1971 for $4,838/£2,000, was sold by Christie’s, London for $65,677/£45,000 in 1983. [See Who was Algernon Moses Marsden?]

The Dreamer, by James Tissot. Private Collection. Courtesy http://www.jamestissot.org

James Tissot painted Kathleen Newton in the study above [called The Dreamer] in 1878, selling it for £206 as Rêverie at the Dudley Gallery in London. In the 1920s, a man bought it “for a few pounds.” In 1984, the man’s daughter brought the picture to a valuation day at Woodbridge Community Hall in Suffolk, England. She had no idea what it was, but said, “It has been on the wall for as long as I can remember. My dad always used to poke around the sale rooms and this just came home. I can’t remember when. The story always was that he bought it because it reminded him of my mother, they both had the same auburn colored hair. Nobody knew anything about it in the family. We had it re-framed, and while it was at the framer’s somebody offered us £600 for it and so we thought we should get it looked at professionally.” A Sotheby’s representative at the valuation day said, “I remember turning round to say something to my secretary and when I turned back again this gentleman had put the picture down on the table in front of me. I remember taking one look at it and thinking to myself, “My God, a Tissot.”

The 1878 oil study, measuring 11 by 17 in. (27.94 by 43.18 cm), was sold by Sotheby’s, London in 1984 as Rêverie for $ 38,678/£ 32,000.

Reading the News (1874) was sold at Christie’s, London in 1947 for $ 1,168/£ 290 – and then in 1983 for $ 252,892/£ 170,000. Just six years later, it was sold at Sotheby’s, New York in 1989 for $ 1,250,000/£ 797,295 – at that time, the highest auction price on record for an oil painting by Tissot.

Reading the News (1874), by James Tissot. 34 by 20 in./86.36 by 50.80 cm. Private Collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

James Tissot and the Revival of Victorian Art in the 1960s

If only we’d bought James Tissot’s paintings in the 1970s!

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 in the Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection

September 11, 2014, 5:09 pm

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

≪ Previous: James Tissot’s popularity boom in the 1980s

Award-winning musical theater composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948) became interested in Victorian art at the age of eight. As he achieved success with his musicals, Evita (1976), Cats (1981), Phantom of the Opera (1986) and Sunset Boulevard (1993), he began to collect Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

His collection of Victorian art, assembled over a period of forty years and now one of the world’s largest in private hands, includes works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, John William Waterhouse, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Giovanni Boldini, and James Tissot.

Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1992, Lord Lloyd-Webber spent 10 million on paintings during three weeks in 1994, according to the London Telegraph.

All the Tissot paintings in his collection are from the artist’s London period, 1871-1882, and were purchased in the 1990s.

As of 1989, the highest auction price on record for an oil painting by James Tissot was Reading the News (1874) sold at Sotheby’s, New York that year for $ 1,250,000/£ 797,295.

L’Orpheline (Orphans) (1879), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 85 by 43 in./216 by 109.2 cm. Private Collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

On February 18, 1993, Christie’s, New York offered two major Tissot oil paintings at its sale of 19th Century European Paintings, Drawings & Watercolors. One of them, L’Orpheline (Orphans, 1879), features Tissot’s mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton (1854 – 1882) and was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879. L’Orpheline beat the 1989 record for a Tissot oil – bringing $2,700,000/£ 1,867,865 from Lloyd-Webber. [The second painting was Jeune femme chantant a l'orgue/Young Woman Singing at the Organ.]

Quiet (c. 1878/79), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 13 by 9 in./33.02 by 22.86 cm. Private Collection. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

Quiet (c. 1881) was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1881. It 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 November, 1993, selling to Lloyd Webber at Christie’s, London for $ 416,220/£ 280,000. In perfect condition, it shows Kathleen Newton and her niece, Lilian Hervey (1875 – 1952) in the garden of Tissot’s house at 17 (now 44) Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood, in north London. It was Lilian Hervey who, in 1946, publicly identified “La Mystérieuse” – the Mystery Woman – as her aunt, Kathleen Newton.

Uncle Fred (Frederick Kelly with his niece Lilian Hervey, 1879-80), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 7 by 12 in./17.78 by 30.48 cm. Private Colletion. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

Uncle Fred (Kathleen Newton’s brother, Frederick Kelly, with his niece Lilian Hervey, 1879-80), previously had been in a private collection in Besançon, France. Lloyd Webber purchased the painting at Sotheby’s, New York in February, 1994 for $ 320,000/£ 216,802. It was Frederick Kelly, incidentally, who arranged Kathleen’s marriage to Isaac Newton, a surgeon in the Indian Civil Service on January 3, 1871, when she was seventeen.

The marriage ended in divorce within months, and Mrs. Newton returned to England. She gave birth to a daughter at the end of the year, and a son in 1876, the year by which she began living with James Tissot in London.

Le banc de jardin/The Garden Bench (1882), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 99.1 by 142.2 cm. Private collection. (Photo: Wikiart)

American millionaire Frederick Koch (b. 1933) began collecting Victorian paintings in the 1980s. James Tissot’s Le banc de jardin (The Garden Bench, c. 1882) set an auction price record in 1983, when Fred Koch paid $ 803,660/£ 520,000 for it at Christie’s, London. This was a favorite image of Tissot’s, depicting his happy half-dozen years with Kathleen Newton and her children in his garden; the artist kept it all his life. Pictured are Mrs. Newton, her daughter Violet (1871 – 1933), her son Cecil George (1876 – 1941), and a second girl who could be her niece Lilian Hervey or her niece Belle (behind the bench). [See Was Cecil Newton James Tissot’s son?]

Kathleen Newton died of tuberculosis on November 9, 1882. [See James Tissot’s garden idyll & Kathleen Newton’s death.]

In October, 1994, Le Banc de jardin set another record for a Victorian picture – as well as a record to date for a Tissot painting – when Lloyd Webber purchased it from Fred Koch for $ 4,800,000/£ 3,035,093 at Sotheby’s, New York.

The Widower (c. 1877), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 14 by 9 in. (35.56 by 22.86 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Lloyd Webber purchased The Widower (c. 1887), which Tissot exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, at Sotheby’s, London in November, 1994 for $ 122,587/£ 75,000.

The Captain and the Mate, (1873), by James Tissot. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, © 2012

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

The Captain and the Mate (1873) features Margaret Kennedy (1840-1930), the wife of Tissot’s friend, Captain John Freebody, (b. 1834). Freebody was the master of the Arundel Castle from 1872-73, and his ship took emigrants to America. Margaret’s older brother, red-bearded Captain Lumley Kennedy (b. 1819), and her sister posed as well. Tissot exhibited The Captain’s Daughter, The Last Evening and Too Early [both at the Guildhall Art Gallery, London] at the Royal Academy in 1873.

Lloyd Webber acquired The Captain and the Mate in 1995. It is one of two paintings featuring Margaret Kennedy in private collections [the other is Boarding the Yacht (1873)].

The Return from the Boating Trip (1873), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 24 by 17 in. (60.96 by 43.18 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

The Return from the Boating Trip (1873), one of dozens of Tissot oils that changed hands during the 1980s, was sold at Christie’s, London in 1982 for $ 31,852/£ 20,000. It was acquired by Lloyd Webber in 1995.

“Good bye” – On the Mersey (c. 1881), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 33 by 21 in. (83.82 by 53.34 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

In 1969, Princeton student Christopher (Kip) Forbes, with his father Malcolm Forbes (1919 – 1990) of the American business magazine publishing dynasty, began amassing a large collection of Victorian art. Kip wrote that by early 1970, when he was 20, “we were buying at a fairly dizzying clip,” and it was his father who purchased several “must have” paintings at Christie’s in 1970, including James Tissot’s “Good bye” – On the Mersey (c. 1881), at prices which far exceeded their agreed-upon limits.

Lloyd Webber acquired “Goodbye” – On the Mersey, which depicts well-wishers on a small local ferry waving at a Cunad steamer setting sail from the port of Liverpool, in 1997. It is one of two known versions painted by Tissot, one of which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1881.

Of course, the Tissot paintings form just a fraction of Lloyd Webber’s collection of Victorian art, but he owns more Tissot oils than the Tate Gallery in London.

A 1995 plan for putting his collection on permanent public view, in a gallery on the South Bank within a new £50 million arts complex designed by Sir Richard Rogers and entirely funded by Lloyd Webber’s theater operating company, the Really Useful Group, was dropped.

But Lord Lloyd-Webber and his wife, Madeleine, lent about three-quarters of their collection – some 200 paintings – to London’s Royal Academy of Arts for “Pre-Raphaelite and other masters: the Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection,” from September 20 to December 12, 2003. The collection is unlikely ever to be shown again, though Lloyd Webber has said, “I hope that after my death my family will be able to find a way to exhibit the best of my collection on a more permanent basis.”

Kathleen Newton by James Tissot: eight auctioned oil paintings

James Tissot and the Revival of Victorian Art in the 1960s

If only we’d bought James Tissot’s paintings in the 1970s!

James Tissot’s popularity boom in the 1980s

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

September 24, 2014, 6:19 am

≫ Next: James Tissot’s “A Civic Procession” (c. 1879)

≪ Previous: James Tissot in the Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection

On a sunny September afternoon, a black cab brought my husband and me to the gate at James Tissot’s former home in London, in Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood. Built in 1825, the house was No. 17 when Tissot lived in it from early 1873 to late 1882; it now is No. 44.

Behind the glossy wooden gate is a graveled courtyard and parking area, and it was bustling with the household staff of a couple with four sons, who bought the house in 2006.

We were ushered through a covered, colonnaded access way to the front door, where we were met by the lady of the house. Unpretentious and kind, she earned a degree from the University of Richmond – a 15-minute drive from my home in Virginia. She offered us refreshments and graciously showed us through her home. She once had lived nearby, had always admired the house, and was intrigued when it came on the market in 2006, for the first time since the mid-1950s.

http://www.lacrank.com/

The house had been renovated and returned to an imposing, single-family dwelling in 2003. [See James Tissot’s house at St. John’s Wood, London.]

When the house went up for sale, The Sunday Times [London] reported:

“It is spread over four floors, relatively few for a property of this size, and the ground and first floors are a sprawling 5,000 square feet per floor. There are seven bedroom suites (with space for en-suite bathrooms and dressing rooms); a three storey-high artist’s studio with enormous windows; five large reception rooms (the main one leading to a conservatory); billiard room; security room; staff living quarters; a kitchen; countless storage rooms and a lift. All the main reception rooms are on the ground floor. All up, it’s 16,000 square feet and, with the garden, measures 0.6 of an acre.”

Bathrooms and a kitchen needed to be installed, and a great number of other renovations were necessary.

When James Tissot moved into the house in early in 1873, it was a medium-sized, two-storey Queen Anne villa. In 1875, Tissot built an extension with a studio and huge conservatory that doubled the size of his house. Eight years later, after the funeral of his young mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton (1854 – 1882), Tissot moved to Paris. See James Tissot’s garden idyll & Kathleen Newton’s death.

Through an agent, the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema purchased the house in 1883, moved into it in mid-1885, and began extensive remodeling to enlarge and modify it into an Italianate mansion appropriate for his popular paintings of ancient Rome.

He built a three-story studio, capped with a semi-circular dome covered in aluminum, which gave a silvery tone to his paintings.

Alma-Tadema died in 1912, and the house was converted to apartments in the 1920s. It later fell into disrepair and ended up on English Heritage’s “at risk” register. In 1975, the property was marked with a blue plaque in honor of Alma-Tadema’s residence.

The property has been a Grade II listed building since 1987: Grade II listed buildings are particularly important buildings of more than special interest. A listed building may not be demolished, extended, or altered without special permission from the local planning authority. The current owners followed strict guidelines in their remodeling and upgrades. You can see some of the results at http://www.jenkins-design.co.uk/groveendroad/.

Now, elegant white walls are punctuated by wide Victorian doors of dark, polished wood, and here and there are built-in wooden cabinets and painted 19^th-century cupboards. The doors were found in the basement and reattached, and the cabinets and cupboards are protected by the property’s Grade II status. The artistic mottoes that Alma-Tadema painted over a few thresholds remain, and the lady of the house has a soft spot for these sentiments about the joy of friends and conviviality. Her home, decorated in a modern, minimalist style with contemporary art, perfectly marries Victorian touches with the owners’ taste: one door is flanked by Alma-Tadema’s exotic, red-patterned ceramic tiles, and our hostess found a china pattern that echoes them. Her husband initially was not keen on living in a Victorian house, but has grown to love it as well. It is very much a comfortable family home exuding hospitality.

The dining area, also painted white, is clearly a Victorian space, with its dark mantel, ceiling beams and towering cabinetry. The original, hefty bronze door rings are charming.

The centerpiece of the house is the room, now a spacious reception area, which was Alma-Tadema’s three-storey studio, with its huge, half-domed apse that faces slightly northeast. He had covered it with aluminum, and the effect has been recreated with squares of aluminum leaf that also meld with the current décor. The owners also recreated Alma-Tadema’s long, Romanesque frieze across the balcony overlooking the studio.

Hide and Seek (1877), by James Tissot.

It was challenging for me to observe any presence of James Tissot’s gorgeously cluttered Victorian home in this sprawling, immaculately modern dwelling with an underground swimming pool and spa. As we followed our hostess up stairways and down shorter flights of steps, and through halls and nooks, I felt disoriented as I struggled to glimpse the footprint of the studio extension that Tissot constructed in 1875. Looking out the windows did not help, as the garden is much smaller now than it was when the house was Tissot’s. The pool, on the eastern side of the house, which Tissot painted so often was buried during the renovations due to its dilapidated condition. But as I again descended the steps from Alma-Tadema’s grand studio and faced a small, sun-lit conservatory, I suddenly felt a sense of déjà vu. The conservatory has a monstera tree that our hostess chose to have planted there because of a specimen she had seen in The Regent’s Park. Only later did she realize it is the exact tree that appears in many of Tissot’s oil paintings, such as In the Conservatory (Rivals), The Bunch of Lilacs, and Dans la serre. She said the coincidence makes her shiver.

In the Conservatory (Rivals), . 1875, by James Tissot. Note the monstera plant in the background on the left. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

She generously invited my husband and me to linger and have another look at any part of the house we wished to see again. It was the garden I wanted to study more closely, but try as I might, I could discern little resemblance to the colonnaded idyll that Tissot created in 1875.

Rather than being a museum, the house where James Tissot and Lawrence Alma-Tadema lived and painted is alive and lovingly cared for by people who respect the home’s history and are sensitive to the interest in the building. In addition, the current owners run a charitable foundation from the house which provides opportunities for bright people from the developing world, especially the Middle East, to have a good education and also supports a number of humanitarian causes.

We thanked our hostess for sharing her time and her home with us and were shown by staff back through the labyrinth of rooms to the front of the house.

That day, we also explored some sites associated with Kathleen Kelly.

Church of Our Lady, Lisson Grove, built in 1836.

Kathleen Irene Ashburnham Kelly Newton, Tissot’s beguiling mistress, 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. Immediately after the funeral on November 14, at the Church of Our Lady in Lisson Grove, St. John’s Wood, Tissot returned to Paris.

For those of you who are Beatles fans, Tissot’s former home is just steps away from the crossing at Abbey Road, made famous by the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, released in 1969 and still the band’s best-selling album.

6 Hill Road

We crossed Abbey Road to find the house that Kathleen Newton lived in when she met James Tissot around 1875 or 1876, when she was staying with her married sister, Mary Pauline “Polly” Ashburnham Kelly Hervey (1851/52 – 1896), and her husband and children at 6 Hill Road.

Click here to see an 1871 London map showing Grove End Road in relation to Hill Road.

The Church of Our Lady is further south, and St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery is at Kensal Green, west of St. John’s Wood.

Kathleen Newton’s grave is located a short walk from the cemetery office; the cemetery superintendent led us there.

You would have to know where to look for plot 2903A, because it is difficult to read the name on the grave.

Also, the standing cross has fallen, and its disintegrating pieces are laid over the grave.

Just to the left are two similar graves from 1893 and 1894, and they are in excellent shape with the crosses still standing, but there are other nearby graves in the same condition as Kathleen Newton’s.

We found her grave covered with weeds, but I had come prepared with a pair of disposable gloves and cleared it as best as I was able. It took a fair bit of time, and some of the growth was too prickly to remove.

Kathleen Newton’s grave as we found it.

The grave after the weeds were pulled.

Kathleen Newton’s grave, under the chestnut tree to the far right, between the tall cross and the raised tomb.

Arched over Kathleen’s grave are the branches of a lovely chestnut tree – the same tree that James Tissot painted over her in life in pictures including Holyday and October. She was loved and celebrated, and though her grave is neglected and dilapidated, her beauty and her name will live forever.

That afternoon was unforgettable and a highlight of our week in the U.K.

Related posts:

Tissot in the Conservatory

Kathleen Newton by James Tissot: eight auctioned oil paintings

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 “A Civic Procession” (c. 1879)

October 2, 2014, 7:54 pm

≫ Next: James Tissot’s “Miss Sydney Milner-Gibson” (c. 1872)

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

James Tissot painted A Civic Procession Descending Ludgate Hill, London (oil on canvas, 84.5 by 43 in./214.6 by 109.2 cm), around 1879, while he was living at 17 (now 44) Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood.

Tissot moved back to Paris in mid-November, 1882, after the death of his young mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton.

He gave the picture to Léonce Bénédite (1859 – 1925). From 1886 until Tissot’s death in 1902 and beyond, Bénédite was the deputy director and then curator of the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris.

The Musée du Luxembourg was the first French museum to be opened to the public, in 1750, with about 125 paintings by Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Veronese, Titian, Poussin, Van Dyck and Rembrandt. These works later were sent to the Louvre, and in 1818, the Musée du Luxembourg was designated a “museum for living artists” – a museum of contemporary art. The work of David, Ingres, Delacroix and others was exhibited there. The Musée du Luxembourg was closed after a national museum of modern art was built in the Palais de Tokyo in 1937, but it reopened to the public in 1979, with exhibitions highlighting France’s regional heritage and collections from provincial museums.

In the meantime, Tissot’s painting was purchased by the Corporation of London through S.C. L’Expertise, Paris, from the curator’s granddaughter, Mme. Léonce Bénédite, in 1972. It now is in the collection of the Guildhall Art Gallery, which houses the art collection of the City of London.

According to curator Jeremy Johnson, the painting formerly was called The Lord Mayor’s Show, but the subject matter is uncertain. To date, there is no documentation, no letters, no information at all on this picture.

Until 2011, the painting was on display as part of an ongoing exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery on civic life in London.

While A Civic Procession is not currently on view, I was able to see it by appointment when I was in London recently.

The picture raises numerous questions:

The Household Guard are shown in the background, but the significance of the red and white badges is unknown; what ceremony does it depict?

Was this a study, or a finished work? It is quite large – was it a commission?

Why did Tissot give a painting about London to a curator of a museum of contemporary art in Paris?

Léonce Bénédite, the curator of the Musée du Luxembourg, began his career there as deputy director in 1886. An art historian of considerable energy and ambition, he was appointed curator in 1892. Matilda Arnoux, director of research at the German Centre for Art History, Paris, noted that Bénédite saw the Luxembourg as the “antechamber” of the Louvre – a way station designed to highlight contemporary works that later would chronicle the history of nineteenth-century art – and that he believed the museum must represent international trends in modern art. With limited funds and space, Bénédite pursued personal relationships with artists through numerous trips abroad from 1893 to 1921.

His taste was conservative, and while his objective was to acquire a major work by every contemporary artist, including the Belgian Alfred Stevens, the American John Singer Sargent, and the Englishman Edward Burne-Jones, he did not seek to acquire daring works by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh or Edvard Munch.

He also welcomed gifts and bequests, and he accepted Manet’s Olympia (1863), when it was offered in 1890 after Claude Monet organized a public subscription.

Of course, one of James Tissot’s oil paintings had entered the Luxembourg when he was only twenty-five: in 1860, The Meeting of Faust and Marguerite attracted the attention of the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, France’s Director-General of Museums, who purchased the painting on behalf of the government for the Luxembourg Museum for 5,000 francs. This was a tremendous honor for Tissot; he exhibited the painting in the Salon of 1861, where he won an honorable mention.

With his place in the pantheon of contemporary artists long since ensured, James Tissot gave Léonce Bénédite this large painting as a personal gift at some time prior to the artist’s death in 1902.

Study for “Le Sphinx” (Woman in an Interior, c. 1885), by James Tissot. Private Collection. Courtesy http://www.jamestissot.org

The two men were friends, as indicated by another gift. Around 1885, Tissot gave Study for ‘Le Sphinx’ (Woman in an Interior, oil on panel, 43 3/4 by 27 in. /111.1 by 68.6 cm) to Léonce Bénédite. This image from Tissot’s La Femme à Paris series, which remained with the Bénédite family until it was sold around 1972, actually was a portrait of Louise Riesener (1860 – 1944). The same year, Tissot planned to marry Mlle. Riesener, the granddaughter of portrait painter Henri Riesener (1767 – 1828), a daughter of the painter Léon Riesener (1808-1878), and a cousin of painter Eugène Delacroix (1798 – 1863). Along with her sister Rosalie, she belonged to the same artistic social set as Berthe Morisot, for whom they modeled. Unfortunately, one day when the forty-nine-year-old Tissot removed his overcoat in the front hall, his appearance struck his twenty-five-year-old fiancée as old-fashioned. Louise suddenly decided that she had lost her desire to marry. In 2005, Study for ‘Le Sphinx’ sold at Sotheby’s, New York for $ 650,000 USD/£ 364,023 GBP (Hammer price).

It was fascinating to see A Civic Procession in person and study it closely.

It is far less detailed than Tissot’s most well-known pictures, and the brushstrokes are extremely loose and Impressionistic.

Was this an attempt by Tissot to emulate the progressive style of the colleagues he had declined to join when his friend Edgar Degas exhorted him to exhibit with a group of struggling, unknown artists in Paris in 1874, a few years after Tissot had established a new and lucrative career in London?

Special thanks to Jeremy Johnson and Andrew Lane for arranging for me to view this painting.

Artistic intimates: Tissot’s patrons among his friends & colleagues

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

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 “Miss Sydney Milner-Gibson” (c. 1872)

October 9, 2014, 6:11 pm

≫ Next: Celebrities & Millionaires Vie for Tissot’s Paintings in the 1990s

≪ Previous: James Tissot’s “A Civic Procession” (c. 1879)

The memory of an English gentlewoman painted by James Tissot survives in the large portrait he was commissioned to paint of her by his young friend, Thomas Gibson Bowles (1842 – 1922).

After the horrors of the Franco-Prussian War and its bloody aftermath, the Paris Commune, Tissot arrived in London in May or June, 1871 with less than one hundred francs but with numerous British friends including Tommy Bowles.

Bowles, who was living at Cleeve Lodge, Queen’s Gate, near Hyde Park, let Tissot use his rented apartment in Palace Chambers at 88 St. James’s Street. Tissot sold caricatures to Vanity Fair and painted on commission.

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.

Miss Sydney Milner-Gibson (September 28, 1849 – September 30, 1880), c. 1872, by James Tissot. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

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. Some scholars deduce it was a late 21st-birthday gift, and that milestone may well have been the reason for the commission. It may also have provided the perfect opportunity for Bowles to help Tissot establish himself in the London art world.

At 50 by 39.02 in. (127.0 by 99.1 cm), the portrait of Sydney is much larger than the 1870 portrait that Bowles commissioned Tissot to paint of his dashing friend Gus Burnaby (Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, 1842 – 1885), a captain in the privileged Royal Horse Guards, the cavalry regiment that protected the monarch. [Burnaby’s portrait, at the National Portrait Gallery, London, measures just 19.5 by 23.5 in./49.5 by 59.7 cm).]

Since Sydney Milner-Gibson was the granddaughter of a baronet, the portrait commission would have been a real coup for a French artist little known in London.

Two short letters written by James Tissot about this portrait were discovered in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1992. The first, to Susannah Milner-Gibson during the winter of 1871-72, reveals that Tissot arranged the initial sittings with Miss Milner-Gibson through her mother, who had been educated in a French convent and spent much time in Paris. The second, written on March 13, 1872, is to the young lady herself, as the frustrated artist attempted to arrange time to finish the London living room setting in time for the portrait to be displayed at the imminent Royal Academy Exhibition. But the picture was not exhibited then, or ever during Tissot’s lifetime. [It was, however, included in a Tissot exhibition which toured five cities in Japan from March to September, 1988.]

In 1880, the unmarried Sydney died of tuberculosis at Hawstead, in Suffolk outside Bury St. Edmunds, two days after her thirty-first birthday.

Tommy Bowles named his first daughter after her: Sydney (1880-1963), later Lady Redesdale, who was the mother of the famous Mitford sisters.

Moyses Hall Museum. (Photo: R. Zuercher)

Sydney Milner-Gibson’s younger brother, George Gery Milner Gibson, died unmarried in 1921 and bequeathed most of the family portraits to the Borough of St. Edmundsbury.

From 1923 to 1959, Sydney’s portrait was displayed in the town library, and later at the Art Gallery.

It was displayed at the Clock Museum, Angel Corner, in Bury St. Edmunds from 1989 to 1992, and then at the Manor House Museum until it was closed in 2006.

Since 2012, the painting, which was valued at £1.8 million and cannot be sold, has been displayed at Moyse’s Hall Museum.

James Tissot’s portrait of Sydney Milner-Gibson currently is displayed in the Edwardson Room first floor gallery, where I recently saw it after a quick train ride from Cambridge.

Tissot captured the sweet, reticent personality and awkwardness of Tommy Bowles’ beloved little sister. Every detail of her portrait is beautifully painted, from the reflection of her hairstyle in the mirror behind her to the gown and its ruffles, and the vase of flowers on the right.

Portrait of Mlle. L.L. (Young Lady in a Red Jacket), February 1864, by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 48 13/16 by 39 3/8 in. (124 by 99.5 cm). Museé d’Orsay, Paris. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

At the very least, the display of Sydney Milner-Gibson’s portrait at the Royal Academy exhibition would have been Tissot’s entrée into the lucrative world of aristocratic British portraiture dominated by his friend John Everett Millais.

But had Miss Milner-Gibson been a more attractive, confident and stylish young woman – and had Tissot had time to finish her portrait in time for the Royal Academy exhibition that year – no doubt this picture would be more well-known.

Perhaps it might have created a sensation, as did Portrait of Mlle. L.L. (Young Lady in a Red Jacket), which Tissot painted in Paris in February 1864 and exhibited at the Salon that year.

Sydney Milner-Gibson appears in my novel, The Hammock, with Tommy Bowles as James Tissot paints her portrait in 1872. Click the link below to immerse yourself in their world!

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

Paris, June 1871

London, June 1871

Tissot in the U.K.: Cambridgeshire, Oxford & Bury St. Edmunds

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.

↧

Celebrities & Millionaires Vie for Tissot’s Paintings in the 1990s

October 16, 2014, 7:24 pm

≫ Next: The Stars of Victorian Painting: Auction Prices

≪ Previous: James Tissot’s “Miss Sydney Milner-Gibson” (c. 1872)

Despite the exploding art prices for James Tissot’s oil paintings in the 1980s, there still were some bargains to be had in the early 1990s.

Going to business (Going to the City), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 17 by 7 in. (43.18 by 17.78 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

In 1991, the most colorful celebrity ever to own an oil painting by James Tissot purchased A Type of Beauty (1880). This portrait of Tissot’s young mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton (1854 – 1882), had sold at Sotheby’s, New York in early 1989 for $ 675,000/£ 385,560, but on October 25, 1991, it was purchased at Christie’s, London for only $ 273,760/£ 160,000 by rock star Freddie Mercury, of the band Queen. [A big thanks to @stefan_buc on Twitter, who brought this fact to my attention, along with documentation.] The painting was displayed in Mercury’s London home, Garden Lodge, a twenty-eight room Georgian mansion in Kensington amid a large garden surrounded by a high brick wall. Freddie Mercury died at 45 on November 24, 1991. In his will, he left Garden Lodge, worth £10 million, to his friend Mary Austin (b. 1951).

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)

Tissot’s title can be explained by a painting by another painting of the era. For an exhibition called “Female Beauty,” The Graphic magazine commissioned paintings in 1880 by twelve artists including James Tissot, Frederic Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Marcus Stone. Alma-Tadema’s picture was titled Interrupted – A Type of Feminine Beauty. It was a portrait of his second wife, Laura Theresa Epps (1852 – 1909), seated in the sitting room of their London home, Townshend House, holding a copy of The Graphic.

In early 1993, Victorian art expert Christopher Wood (1941 – 2009) commented on the popularity of James Tissot’s oil paintings among Manhattan Society hostesses: “I can think of ten to twenty Tissots within a few blocks of each other in New York.”

So there was great excitement in New York that year on Wednesday, February 17 and Thursday, February 18, when Sotheby’s offered three major Tissot paintings, and Christie’s two.

The three paintings at Sotheby’s, from Tissot’s series of fifteen large-scale pictures called La Femme à Paris (The Parisian Woman) painted between 1883 and 1885, were being sold by Toronto collectors Joey and Toby Tanenbaum.

Joey Tanenbaum (born 1932), the son of Polish immigrants who made their fortune in steel fabrication, is Chairman and CEO of Jay-M Enterprises Ltd. and Jay-M Holdings and has built his fortune through real estate and hydroelectric power. He and his wife, Toby, bought Tissot oil paintings in the 1970s, when appreciation for Victorian painting was just beginning to grow. The Tanenbaums made a hobby of collecting rediscovered masterpieces of English and French academic painting, and it became nearly a full-time effort. By 1993, as their interest shifted to Old Master paintings, especially Spanish and Italian works of the 17th century, and antiquities, they were running out of ready cash to develop their collection. They put their three Tissot oil paintings up for sale through Sotheby’s, New York and hoped to beat the record price for a Tissot, $1,250,000/£ 797,295, set in 1989 at the same auction house for Reading the News (1874).

The Tanenbaums also said they sold the works rather than donate them to a museum because of recent decisions by Canada’s Cultural Properties Review Board.

The Tanenbaums’ three Femme à Paris paintings, each valued by Sotheby’s at $ 1.2-2 USD (£ 800,000-1.3 million), were:

La Mondaine (The Woman of Fashion), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 58 by 40 in. (147.32 by 101.60 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

‘La Mondaine’ – Woman of Fashion, sold for $ 1,800,000/£ 1,246,105.

Study for "Le Sphinx," by James Tissot. Courtesy www.jamestissot.org

Study for “Le Sphinx,” by James Tissot. Private Collection. Courtesy http://www.jamestissot.org

Study for ‘Le Sphinx’ – Woman in Interior, sold for $ 800,000/£ 553,824.

Sans Dot (Without Dowry), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 58 by 41 in. (147.32 by 104.14 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

‘Sans Dot’ – Without Dowry, sold for $ 800,000/£ 553,824.

The next day, at Christie’s, Tissot’s Jeune femme chantant à l’orgue (Young Woman Singing at the Organ), sold for $ 100,000/£ 69,180. L’Orpheline (Orphans), the better of Christie’s two Tissots, was expected to bring $ 600,000- 800,000 (£ 400,000- 530,000). It set a new record for a Tissot oil when sold for $ 2,700,000/£ 1,867,865 to art dealer David Mason, with MacConnal-Mason, a fourth generation gallery in St. James established in 1893. Mason buys for musical composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948), who in the next decade would collect some of Tissot’s best work – at very high prices.

Beginning in 1993, American oil millionaire Fred Koch (b. 1933) sold his collection of Victorian paintings over several months. “Very few of the great paintings in that collection got past Andrew,” said one dealer. Lloyd Webber’s purchases from the Koch Collection include James Tissot’s Le banc de jardin (The Garden Bench), which he purchased in 1994 for $ 4,800,000/£ 3,035,093, a new record for the artist. [See James Tissot in the Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection.]

Quiet (c. 1881), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 13 by 9 in. (33.02 by 22.86 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

In early November, 1993, a small painting by Tissot appeared on the market. Quiet (c. 1881) originally 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 of Kathleen Newton and her niece, Lilian Hervey in the garden of Tissot’s house at 17 Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood, in north London, remained in the family, in perfect condition, until it was sold for $ 416,220/£ 280,000.

Chrysanthemums (c. 1874-76), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 46 by 30 in. (116.84 by 76.20 cm). Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

Chrysanthemums (c. 1874-76) was another Tissot oil sold from a long-held private collection as prices for the artist’s work surged in the 1990s. It originally was purchased by British cotton magnate, MP and contemporary art collector Edward Hermon (1822 – 1881) by 1877, the year his only daughter was married. In 1882, Hermon’s estate sold it through Christie’s, London to the prominent art dealership Arthur Tooth and Son. The painting next belonged to Surgeon-Major (the ranking surgeon of a regiment in the British Army) John Ewart Martin, South Africa and remained in a private collection of his descendants in South Africa until sold through Phillips, London, in December, 1993, to the Christopher Wood Gallery, London, for $ 372,125/£ 250,000. The painting was sold by that gallery to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute at Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1994.

Mavourneen (Portrait of Kathleen Newton), 1877. Oil on canvas, 36 by 20 in. (91.44 by 50.80 cm). Private Collection. 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

Tissot’s 1877 Mavourneen (Portrait of Kathleen Newton) had been in a private collection in Australia before it was purchased by Theodore Bruce, Adelaide, at Christie’s in 1984. By the next year, it was with the Owen Edgar Gallery, London. In 1995, it was sold to an American collector at Christie’s, New York for $ 2,300,000/£ 1,433,915. The painting, in which Mrs. Newton wears the same ensemble as she does in October (1877), was last exhibited at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington from November 28, 2006 through March 30, 2007. Kathleen Mavourneen was a popular love song of the time (“mavourneen” means “my darling”), as well as a play by William Travers, which enjoyed a revival at the Globe Theatre in July, 1876.

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)

The exquisite A Winter’s Walk (Promenade dans la neige) (c. 1878) has belonged to a number of private collectors over the decades, beginning with J.C. Haslam Esq., 32 Queen Anne Street, Cavendish Square, London, whose executors sold it at Christie’s in 1900 to London-based art dealer Arthur Tooth. By 1937, it was owned by Mrs. Bannister, and by 1956 by Henry (Harry) Talbot de Vere Clifton, Lytham Hall, Lancashire. Christie’s sold it once again in 1965, to Leger Galleries, London. It was in a private collection when it was sold by Sotheby’s, London in 1996, to another collector, for $619,160/£ 400,000.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Wall Street magnate John Langeloth Loeb (1902-1996) and his wife, Frances “Peter” Lehman Loeb (1907-1996), former New York City Commissioner to the United Nations, began to form what would become, over the next four decades, one of the greatest private art collections in the United States. The Loebs bought paintings from well-known New York dealers, especially Knoedler and Company, and at auctions in New York and abroad. They displayed them in their Park Avenue apartment, which they opened to curators as well as art historians and their students.

La cheminée/The Fireside (c. 1869), by James Tissot. 20 by 13 in. (50.80 by 33.02 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

The Loebs acquired James Tissot’s La Cheminée/By the Fireside (c. 1869) from Knoedler and Company on January 31, 1955 and Dans la serre (In the Conservatory, 1867-69) from The Fine Arts Society, London on October 7, 1957. Both paintings almost certainly depict the interior of Tissot’s sumptuous villa on the avenue de l’impératrice (now avenue Foch) in Paris, which he moved into in early 1868.

Dans la serre (In the Conservatory, 1867-69, by James Tissot. 28 by 16 in. (71.12 by 40.64 cm). Private Collection. Courtesy http://www.jamestissot.org

Dans la serre sold for $ 440,000/£ 270,986. American stockbroker Jerome Davis purchased La cheminée for $ 1,700,000/£ 1,046,991.

Tea (1872), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 26 by 18 7/8 in. (66 by 47.9 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

Tea (1872) 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. 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. It was purchased from Mathiessen by Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, New York. Upon Mr. Wrightsman’s death in 1986, Mrs. Wrightsman (b. 1919) owned it until 1998, when she gifted it to the Met. Tea recently was put on display at the Met, in Gallery 815.

As of 1998, there were only seventy-one oil paintings by James Tissot in public art collections worldwide: twenty-two in the U.K., two in the Republic of Ireland, fifteen in France, twenty in the U.S. and one in Puerto Rico, six in Canada, one in India, two in Australia, and two in New Zealand.

Still on Top (c. 1874), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 88 by 54 cm. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Tissot’s Still on Top (c. 1874), is in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in New Zealand, the gift of British industrialist and politician Viscount Leverhulme (1851 – 1925) in 1921, when it was worth approximately £ 500. Still on Top depicts two women and an elderly male servant wearing a red liberty cap, a revolutionary symbol in France. It had only been three years since Tissot had fled Paris – under some suspicion – during the French government’s suppression of the radical Paris Commune. It’s really rather daring for an apparent French political refugee of the time, remaking his career in England: as the three figures raise the flags, which is on top?

Painted in Tissot’s extensive garden at his home in St. John’s Wood, London, the picture is similar to his Preparing for the gala, which came up for auction at Sotheby’s, New York in May, 1996. Preparing for the Gala sold for $1,650,000/£ 1,090,188.

On the morning of Sunday, August 9, 1998, the slightly larger Still on Top, worth $3.5 million USD, was stolen from the Auckland Art Gallery by a 48-year-old man with a shotgun who then asked $260,000 ransom from the Auckland Art Gallery. The painting was recovered under a bed at the home the man rented in Waikaretu, south of Port Waikato, on August 17. Restoration of the picture, which had been terribly damaged, began in February 1999. [For the full story of the robbery – including surveillance video – and the repairs to Still on Top, click here.]

Later that year, from September 22 to November 28, 1999, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, held the first Tissot retrospective in the U.S. since 1968: “James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love.” The exhibition featured approximately 40 paintings, 40 prints and 20 watercolors selected from public and private collections in North America, Europe and Australia, including works from the Tate Gallery in London, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. On display for the first time in the U.S. was Tissot’s The Hammock (1879), reportedly owned at that time by American stockbroker Jerome Davis of Greenwich, Connecticut.

The exhibition traveled to the Musée du Québec, Québec City, from December 15, 1999 to March 12, 2000 and to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo from March 24 to July 2, 2000.

Kathleen Newton by James Tissot: eight auctioned oil paintings

James Tissot and the Revival of Victorian Art in the 1960s

If only we’d bought James Tissot’s paintings in the 1970s!

James Tissot’s popularity boom in the 1980s

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you can 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 Stars of Victorian Painting: Auction Prices

October 31, 2014, 5:17 pm

≫ Next: Belle Époque Portraits in Pastel by James Tissot

≪ Previous: Celebrities & Millionaires Vie for Tissot’s Paintings in the 1990s

What is the current value of paintings by the most popular artists of the mid- to late Victorian era? Can you guess whose work brings the top price to date? Where do James Tissot and your favorite artist rank? Here is a list of the twenty-three most valuable pictures sold in the past twenty-one years, from bottom up:

23. John William Waterhouse (1849 – 1917), Ophelia (1894)

Phillips, London (2000): $ 2,253,300/£ 1,500,000

Ophelia (1894), by John William Waterhouse. Oil on canvas, 49 by 29 in. (124.46 by 73.66 cm). (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

22. Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836 – 1912), Roses of Heliogabalus (1888)

Christie’s, London (1993): $ 2,288,250/£ 1,500,000

Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Oil on canvas, 52 by 84 in. (132.08 by 213.36 cm). (Photo Wikimedia.org)

21 (tie). James Tissot (1836 – 1902), Mavourneen, Portrait of Kathleen Newton (1877)

Christie’s, New York (1995): $ 2,300,000/£ 1,433,915

Mavourneen, Portrait of Kathleen Newton (1877), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 36 by 20 in. (91.44 by 50.80 cm). (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

21 (tie). Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836 – 1912). Baths of Caracalia – Thermae Antoniniane (1899)

Sotheby’s, New York (1993): $ 2,300,000/£ 1,488,191

Baths of Caracalia – Thermae Antoniniane (1899), by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Oil on canvas, 60 by 37 in. (152.40 by 93.98 cm). (Photo: Wikiart.org)

20. James Tissot (1836 – 1902), La cheminée (The Fireplace, c. 1869)

Christie’s, London (2003): $ 2,334,780/£ 1,400,000

La cheminée, (c. 1869), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 20 by 13 in. (50.80 by 33.02 cm). (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

19. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903), Harmony in grey, Chelsea in ice (1864)

Christie’s, New York (2000): $ 2,600,000/£ 1,768,106

18. John William Waterhouse (1849 – 1917), Ophelia (1889)

Sotheby’s, London (2001): $ 2,633,290/£ 1,850,000

Ophelia (1889), by John William Waterhouse. Oil on canvas, 39 by 62 in. (99.06 by 157.48 cm). (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

17. James Tissot (1836 – 1902), L’Orpheline (Orphans, 1879)

Christie’s, New York (1993): $ 2,700,000/£ 1,867,865

L’Orpheline (Orphans, 1879), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 85 by 43 in. (215.90 by 109.22 cm). (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

16. James Tissot (1836 – 1902), Preparing for the gala (c. 1874-76)

Christie’s, London (2006): $ 2,763,150/£ 1,500,000

15. William Holman Hunt (1827 – 1910), The Shadow of Death (1873)

Sotheby’s, London (1994): $ 2,778,650/£ 1,700,000

The Shadow of Death (1873), by William Holman Hunt. Oil on panel, 41 by 32 in. (104.14 by 81.28 cm). (Photo: wikipaintings.org)

14. James Tissot (1836 – 1902), October (1878)

Sotheby’s, New York (1995): $ 2,800,000/£ 1,775,185

October (1878), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 46 by 21 in. (116.84 by 53.34 cm). (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

13. Sir John Everett Millais (1829 – 1896), Sleeping (1865)

Christie’s, London (1999): $ 3,041,520/£ 1,900,000

Sleeping (1865), by John Everett Millais. Oil on canvas, 35 by 27 in. (88.90 by 68.58 cm). (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

12. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882), The Salutation of Beatrice (1869)

Christie’s, London (2012): $ 3,334,788/£ 2,169,250 (Premium)

The Salutation of Beatrice (1869), by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Oil on canvas, 22.48 by 18.50 in. (57.10 by 47.00 cm). (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

11. Albert Joseph Moore (1841 – 1893), Jasmine (c. 1880)

Christie’s, London (2008): $ 3,476,301/£ 1,777,250 (Premium)

Jasmine (c. 1880), by Albert Moore. Oil on canvas, 26.22 by 19.72 in. (66.60 by 50.10 cm). (Photo: Wikiart.org)

10. Sir John Everett Millais (1829 – 1896), Sisters (1868)

Christie’s, London (2013): $ 3,492,865/£ 2,301,875 (Premium)

Sisters (1868), by John Everett Millais. Oil on canvas, 42.52 by 42.52 in. (108.00 by 108.00 cm) (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

9. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882), Pandora (1869)

Christie’s, London (2000): $ 3,605,280/£ 2,400,000

In 2004, Pandora sold for $ 2,378,480/£ 1,300,000 (Hammer) at Christie’s, London.

Pandora (1869), by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Pastel on paper, 37 by 26 in. (93.98 by 66.04 cm). (Photo: Wikiart.org)

8. James Tissot (1836 – 1902), Le banc de jardin (The Garden Bench, 1880)

Sotheby’s, New York (1994): $ 4,800,000/£ 3,035,093

Le banc de jardin (The Garden Bench, 1880). Oil on canvas, 39 by 56 in. (99.06 by 142.24 cm). (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

7. William Holman Hunt (1827 – 1910), Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1867)

Christie’s, London (2014): $ 4,890,161/£ 2,882,500 (Premium)

Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1867), by William Holman Hunt. Oil on canvas, 23.86 by 15.24 in. (60.60 by 38.70 cm). (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

6. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882), Proserpine (1880)

Sotheby’s, London (2013): $ 5,279,476/£ 3,274,500 (Premium)

Proserpine (1880), by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Colored chalks, 47.24 by 22.05 in. (120.00 by 56.00 cm). (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

5. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882), A Christmas Carol (1867)

Sotheby’s, London (2013): $ 7,463,337/£ 4,562,500 (Premium)

A Christmas Carol, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Oil on panel, 17.91 by 14.96 in. (45.50 by 38.00 cm). (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

4. John William Waterhouse (1849 – 1917), St. Cecilia (1895)

Christie’s, London (2000): $ 9,013,200/£ 6,000,000

St. Cecilia (1895), by John William Waterhouse. Oil on canvas, 48 by 79 in. (121.92 by 200.66 cm). (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

3. Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833 – 1898), Love among the Ruins (1873)

Christie’s, London (2013): $ 22,527,130/£ 14,845,875 (Premium)

Love Among the Ruins (1873), by Edward Burne-Jones. Watercolor, 37.99 by 60.00 in. (96.50 by 152.40 cm) (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

2. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836 – 1912), The Meeting Of Antony And Cleopatra: 41 BC (1883)

Sotheby’s, New York (2011): $ 29,202,500/£ 17,802,060 (Premium)

The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra: 41 BC (1883), by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Oil on panel, 25 3/4 x 36 in. (65.5 by 91.4 cm). (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

1. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836 – 1912), The Finding of Moses (1904)

Sotheby’s, New York (2010): $ 35,922,500/£ 22,080,336 (Premium)

The finding of Moses sold for $ 2,500,000/£ 1,558,603 (Hammer) at Christie’s, New York in 1995.

The Finding of Moses (1904), Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Oil on canvas, 53.82 by 84.02 in. (136.70 by 213.40 cm). (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

This price list is not in perfect order because, as I noted at the outset, some prices are hammer price (the winning bid amount) and some include the premium (hammer price with an additional percentage charged by the auction house, plus taxes). But I’ve compiled the list using the best information available, and I hope you enjoy it!

James Tissot oils at auction: Seven favorites

Kathleen Newton by James Tissot: eight auctioned oil paintings

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.

↧

Belle Époque Portraits in Pastel by James Tissot

November 17, 2014, 12:14 pm

≫ Next: A Closer Look at Tissot’s “The Ladies of the Chariots”

≪ Previous: The Stars of Victorian Painting: Auction Prices

Portrait of the Pilgrim (c. 1886-1896), by James Tissot. Brooklyn Museum, NY. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

James Tissot enjoyed eleven highly successful years in London from 1871 to 1882. After the death of his young mistress, Kathleen Newton, in November, 1882 and his attempted artistic comeback in Paris with La Femme à Paris (Women of Paris, 1883-85) Tissot supposedly dedicated himself solely to illustrating the Bible, even making repeated trips to the Holy Land in 1886-87, 1888 and 1889.

However, he continued to paint beautiful, well-dressed women in sumptuous settings; many of his subjects were aristocrats and other Society figures. Along with the American John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925), the Italian Giovanni Boldini (1842 – 1931), and the French Paul César Helleu (1859 – 1927), James Tissot was sought after for his fashionable portraits.

Once in Paris, Tissot joined the Société d’Aquarellistes Français in 1883 and the Société de Pastellistes Français which was founded in 1885, and his work was included in both societies’ many exhibitions at the Galerie Georges Petit. He executed about forty portraits from the mid-1880s to the early 1890s, most often using pastels.

Here is a look at several of them.

Portrait of Clotilde Briatte, Comtesse Pillet-Will (c. 1883 – 1885), by James Tissot. Pastel on linen, 35 3/4 by 63 1/8 in./91 by 160.5 cm). Private collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

On May 9, 2013, James Tissot’s Portrait of Clotilde Briatte, Comtesse Pillet-Will (c. 1883 – 1885) sold for $185,000 (Premium) at Sotheby’s New York. The sitter only recently had been identified: Clotilde was the wife of Count Alexis Frédéric Pillet-Will (1837-1911), director of the Bank of France, whose family owned the Château Margaux Vineyard. In the early 1900s, Clotilde authored several books on the occult under the pseudonym Charles d’Orino. Tissot’s large portrait of her descended through the Pillet-Will family, Saumur, France, until it was sold at Sotheby’s in 2013.

Portrait of Marie-Héloise Jeanne Ferré May (1856 – 1906), (c. 1885), by James Tissot. Pencil and pastel on paper, 58¾ by 40¼ in. (149.2 by 102.7 cm). Private collection.

Portrait of Marie-Héloise Jeanne Ferré May (1856 – 1906), (c. 1885) was purchased at Sotheby’s, New York, in 1999 for $ 40,000/£ 24,484 by a private collector in California who sold it at Christie’s, New York in 2008. It was offered for sale again at Christie’s, New York in 2012 but failed to attract a buyer. Madame May was the wife of the Parisian stockbroker and collector, Ernest May (1845 – 1925). Her husband collected eighteenth-century and Old Master works before starting to buy contemporary art in the late 1870s. His collection of over thirty works by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was considered the finest in its time, and he became one of the most important early patrons of Impressionist work. By 1890, he owned five works by Claude Monet, six by Camille Pissarro, four by Alfred Sisley and three by Edgar Degas. He commissioned Degas to paint his portrait: Portraits à la Bourse (1878-79) is now in the collection of the Musee d’Orsay, Paris. Degas also made pastel drawings of Madame May not long after the birth of her son, Ètienne, in 1881.

Portrait of Henriette de Bonnières (c. 1885, pastel on paper laid on linen, 64¼ by 37 in. (163.5 by 94 cm) is a graceful depiction of a young woman in a pale blue gown. Henriette (née Henriette Arnand Jeanti, 1854 – 1906) was the wife of Robert de Bonnières, an influential journalist, novelist and poet. Henriette hosted a famous literary salon, which included Alphonse Daudet, Anatole France, Henri de Régnier and José Maria de Heredia. She was also friends with many painters and her portrait was painted by Auguste Renoir, Albert Besnard and Jacques-Emile Blanche. Before he married, French composer Albéric Magnard (1865 – 1914) was said to be madly in love with Henriette, dedicating several pieces to her beginning in 1888. Madame de Bonnières’ portrait by Tissot passed from the Château Grossoeuvre to Madame de la Chennecières, Château de Cierrey and then to a private collection in Switzerland. It was sold at Christie’s, London in 2007. To see it, click here.

Portrait of Vicomtesse de Montmorand (1889), by James Tissot. Pastel, 64 by 32 in. (162.56 by 81.28 cm.). Private collection. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

Portrait of Vicomtesse de Montmorand (1889) was sold at Christie’s, London in 1984 for $ 24,539/£ 18,000. Do you recognize this glamorous woman as the little girl in Tissot’s gorgeous 1865 oil painting, The Marquis and the Marquise de Miramon and their children?

The Marquis and the Marquise de Miramon and their children (1865), by James Tissot. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

The family portrait depicted René de Cassagne de Beaufort, Marquis de Miramon (1835-1882) and his wife, née Thérèse Feuillant (1836-1912), with their first two children, Geneviève and Léon on the terrace of the château de Paulhac in Auvergne, France.

In 1866, Tissot painted the stunning Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née, Thérèse Feuillant.

In 1882, Tissot painted a portrait, known from a photograph in Tissot’s album, of young Geneviève de Miramon, by then the Vicomtesse de Montmorand. In 1889, Tissot made the above pastel portrait of Geneviève.

Tissot’s pastel portrait, Comtesse d’Yanville and Her Four Children (c. 1895), was gifted to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts by Ruth and Bruce Dayton in 1997, but it is not currently on view. Measuring 53 3/16 by 49 1/2 in. (135.1 by 125.73 cm), the picture shows the children (clockwise): Nicole, Simone, Isaure, and Daniel. Click here to see this portrait.

The Princesse de Broglie (c. 1895), by James Tissot. Pastel on linen, 66.14 by 38.11 in. (168.00 by 96.80 cm). Private collection. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

The Princesse de Broglie (c. 1895, pastel on linen, 66.14 by 38.11 in. (168.00 by 96.80 cm) passed from the de Broglie family to Toronto-based collectors Joey and Toby Tanenbaum, who sold it was sold at Sotheby’s, New York in 1989 for $ 1,000,000/£ 622,626. The portrait did not find a buyer when offered for sale at Sotheby’s, New York in 2011 from the Collections of Lily & Edmond J. Safra.

Other Tissot pastel portraits include Portrait de Madame Baele (c. 1880), in the collection of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, France (click here and scroll down to see this picture, on the left), and Portrait of a Lady with a Fan.

Portrait of a Lady with a Fan, by James Tissot. Pastel, 46.50 by 34.49 in. Private collection. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

On November 6, 2014, Portrait of a Young Woman in a Conservatory (1895, pastel on paper stretched over canvas, 64 by 36 1/2 in./162.5 by 92.7 cm), which had been in a private collection in France, was offered for sale at Sotheby’s. Click here to see it.

Admiring a Portfolio (c. 1883, pastel on linen, 23½ by 29 in. (59.7 by 73.7 cm) features a woman who modelled for Tissot on other occasions, and this picture could have been a means of attracting new commissions. It was sold in Sevres, France, around 1900, then at Sotheby’s, London in 1994 to a private collector in California. In 2008, it was sold at Christies, New York for $104,500 to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Yesterday, I visited the Bruce Museum to find it – and I didn’t have to look very hard!

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 Closer Look at Tissot’s “The Ladies of the Chariots”

December 4, 2014, 1:53 pm

≫ Next: A Closer Look at Tissot’s “Too Early”

≪ Previous: Belle Époque Portraits in Pastel by James Tissot

James Tissot’s The Ladies of the Chariots (Ces dames des chars), also called The Circus, was exhibited in Paris in 1885 and in London in 1886. It is the second in his La Femme à Paris series, painted sometime before mid-1884.

The Ladies of the Chariots (c. 1883-85), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 57 ½ by 39 5/8” (146 by 100.65 cm). Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence. (Photo: WIkiart.org)

The women are performers at the Hippodrome de l’Alma, a huge iron and glass structure built in 1877 at the corner of avenues Josephine and Alma. Up to eight thousand spectators could view races around the thirteen-meter track, circus animals whose cages were beneath the ring, and special effects such as mist and fireworks in the grand arena with a sliding roof that could be opened to the sky. Electric lighting made evening performances possible, such as the chariot race pictured, with charioteers known as Amazons wearing glittering costumes. Their diadems are similar to the crown on Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s new statue, Liberty Illuminating the World, which was presented to the United States in a ceremony in Paris on July 4, 1884; it soon would be installed in New York Harbor.

The Ladies of the Chariots was sold by Julius H. Weitzner (1896 – 1986), a leading dealer in Old Master paintings in New York and London, to Walter Lowry, who gifted it to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1958.

Previously hanging in the RISD museum director’s office and not on public display, The Ladies of the Chariots currently is the centerpiece of “Circus,” an exhibition open through Sunday, February 22, 2015.

Go if you can, because this painting really is lovely and rarely can be seen. If you can’t make it (or if you can’t brave New England in the dead of winter), enjoy these photos I took on my recent visit!

Related posts:

Tissot in the U.S.: New England

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 Closer Look at Tissot’s “Too Early”

December 10, 2014, 4:55 pm

≫ Next: A Closer Look at Tissot’s “The Artists’ Wives”

≪ Previous: A Closer Look at Tissot’s “The Ladies of the Chariots”

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.

Victorian art expert Christopher Wood (1941 – 2009) believed this painting was inspired by an illustration, The First to Come by Frederick Barnard, published in the Illustrated London News in 1872. He wrote that it depicted “a nervous young man launched into a drawing room by a superior butler…it was part of Tissot’s genius to see [in such scenes] a potential subject.” Wood commented that Too Early “has deservedly remained one of the most acclaimed of all Tissot’s pictures.”

Too Early (1873), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 27.95 by 40.16 in. (71 by 102 cm). Guildhall Art Gallery, London. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

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.” One critic wrote that he “fairly out-Tissoted himself in his studies of character and expression. [The] truthfulness and delicate perception of the humor of the ‘situation’ [compares to that found] in the novels of Jane Austen, the great painter of the humor of ‘polite society’.” 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 from 1895 to 1902.

Gassiot bequeathed Too Early to the Guildhall Art Gallery, where it is on view for visitors.

On my recent trip to London, I took these photos for you to enjoy!

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

↧

A Closer Look at Tissot’s “The Artists’ Wives”

December 18, 2014, 11:48 am

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

≪ Previous: A Closer Look at Tissot’s “Too Early”

The Artists’ Wives (1885, also called The Artists’ Ladies) depicts a gathering of artists and their wives on Varnishing Day, the evening before the official opening of the Salon, the annual art exhibition in Paris at the Palais de l’Industrie. The artists could put a final coat of protective varnish on their work, and they and their wives and friends could view the exhibition privately, when “the great effort of the year is over, and when our pictures are safely hung, and are inviting the critics to do their worst and the buyers to do their best!” Tissot depicts the celebratory luncheon on the terrace of the restaurant Le Doyen, with the entrance to the Palais de l’Industrie in the background.

Celebrities present include the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917), the man with the brown beard and spectacles standing in the center of the picture. The bearded man in the top hat, prominently sitting with two women in the lower left of the picture, is painter John Lewis Brown (1829 – 1890), described by James McNeill Whistler as “a dear good fellow.”

Tissot displayed The Artists’ Wives at the Galerie Sedelmeyer in Paris in 1885, in a set of fifteen paintings called La Femme à Paris (The Parisian Woman). The series was also exhibited in London, at the Tooth Gallery, in 1886.

In 1889, The Artists’ Wives was sold at Christie’s, London. It belonged to a Mr. Day, then to Philadelphia art dealer and critic Charles Field Haseltine.

By 1894, it was with the Art Association of the Union League of Philadelphia, and by 1981, it was with M. Knoedler and Co. in New York.

The Artists’ Wives was a gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and The Grandy Fund, Landmark Communications Fund, and “An Affair to Remember” to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1981.

The Artists’ Ladies (1885), by James Tissot. 57 1/2 by 40 in. (146.1 by 101.6 cm). The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

There is a lot going on in this painting, so here are some close-up photos I took.

Related posts: