In 1885, when James Tissot could have retired a wealthy man, he reinvented himself. He had earned a total of 1,200,000 francs during his years painting in London (1871 to 1882), largely for the newly-wealthy industrialists of the capital and cities in the north. His stylish images of fashionable women and the leisured life in Victorian England sold for high prices as “modern” art for those who wished to establish themselves as men of taste.

La Plus Jolie Femme de Paris (The Most Beautiful Woman in Paris, or The Fashionable Beauty, from La Femme à Paris, 1883-85), by James Tissot.  Oil on canvas. Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, Switzerland.

But Tissot had returned to Paris immediately after the death of Kathleen Newton, his beautiful young mistress and muse, from tuberculosis in November, 1882. His brilliant early career in the French capital was in the past, and he had tried, and failed, to reclaim his place in the French art world as a painter of modern life with his La Femme à Paris (The Parisian Woman) series, exhibited at the Galerie Sedelmeyer, Paris, from April 19 to June 15, 1885, as “Quinze Tableaux sur la Femme à Paris.”

William Eglinton (c. 1886) (Wiki)

Tissot tried to contact Kathleen Newton through a series of séances, fashionable at the time.

On May 20, 1885, at a séance in London conducted by English medium William Eglington (1857–1933) [who had been exposed as a fraud as early as 1876 but nevertheless enjoyed a successful career], Tissot recognized the female of two spirits who appeared as Kathleen, and he asked her to kiss him.

The spirit is said to have done so, several times, with “lips of fire.” Then she shook hands with Tissot and disappeared.

He made this image of the vision, L’apparition médiunimique, to commemorate their reunion.

L’Apparition médiunimique (The Apparition, 1885), by James Tissot. Mezzotint, Private Collection.  (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

That year, James Tissot had another vision, “a strange and thrilling picture” of Christ. In 1885, while in the Saint-Sulpice church in Paris looking for inspiration for his final painting of the La Femme à Paris series, Musique sacrée (Sacred Music), which depicted a fashionable woman singing a duet with a nun in the organ loft of a church, Tissot experienced a religious revelation. He portrayed it in The Ruins (Inner Voices) and decided he would dedicate the rest of his life to illustrating of the Bible.

The Ruins (Inner Voices), 1885, by James Tissot.  Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.  (Wikiart)

Tissot traveled to the Middle East to research his illustrated Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ between October 1886 and March 1887, visiting sites in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. To make his work as authentic and realistic as possible, he made drawings, notes and photographs of the architecture, topography, and historical costumes, and he sought local models for the main figures.

While Tissot (and his surrogates) created the myth that he devoted the remainder of his life solely to this ambitious religious project, he was able to publicize it, and his spiritual goals, while quietly leading a life among the upper echelon of Parisian Society. He executed about forty portraits of aristocratic French women and other beautiful, wealthy women in sumptuous Belle Époque settings from the mid-1880s to the early 1890s, most often using pastels, as in Portrait of Clotilde Briatte, Comtesse Pillet-Will (c. 1883 – 1885); the wife of an immensely wealthy banker, she would go on to write several books on the occult under the pseudonym Charles d’Orino.

Portrait of Clotilde Briatte, Comtesse Pillet-Will (c. 1883 – 1885), by James Tissot. Pastel on linen. Private collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

A view of the Château de Buillon (Wikimedia)

And Tissot saw to it that his career was progressing in other areas. In 1886, he exhibited his Women of Paris series at Arthur Tooth and Sons, London as Pictures of Parisian Life by J.J. Tissot, and he exhibited with the Société d’aquarellistes français in Paris; in 1887, he exhibited at least one painting, Waiting for the Ferry at the Falcon Tavern (1874), at Nottingham Castle and at Newcastle-on-Tyne; and in 1888, he exhibited three works at the International Exhibition, Glasgow.

His father died in 1888, leaving him the Château de Buillon, near Besançon in eastern France, that he had purchased in 1845. During Tissot’s remaining years, he lived partly in his eclectically-furnished villa in Paris and partly at the imposing Château, enlarging it and embellishing the extensive grounds.

Portrait of the Pilgrim (1894), by James Tissot.  (Wiki)

In 1889, Tissot made a second trip to the Middle East to conduct further research for his Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

He continued to show his work widely; in 1889, he exhibited his Prodigal Son series, for which he won a gold medal, and an oil portrait at the Exhibition Universelle, Paris. In 1893, he exhibited his Prodigal Son series again, along with a pastel portrait, in the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Then, at the Paris Salon of 1894, Tissot exhibited 270 of the ultimate total of 365 drawings for La Vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (The Life of Christ). The pictures were given a gallery and a special catalogue. The public reaction was astonishing: one headline read, “THE CHAMP DE MARS SALON; JAMES TISSOT’S LIFE OF CHRIST A MARVELOUS SERIES. Women Weep as They Pass from Picture to Picture.”

The Birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ (La nativité de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

Jesus Teaches the People by the Sea (Jésus enseigne le peuple près de la mer, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

The Nail for the Feet (Le clou des pieds, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

Jesus Ministered to by Angels (Jésus assisté par les anges), 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

Edmond de Goncourt (1882), by Felix Bracquemond (Wiki)

Tissot’s achievement was the talk of Paris; at a dinner party on May 6, 1894 given by Tissot’s longtime friends Alphonse and Julia Daudet, celebrated writer Émile Zola said he was “captivated” by Tissot’s Bible illustrations, but Daudet had to vociferously defend them to realist painter Jean-François Raffaëlli, who thought them “revolting.”

French writer and art and literary critic Edmond de Goncourt recorded it all, simultaneously impressed by Tissot’s success and critical of what he saw as a “medicore” effort to depict the supernatural.

[Goncourt seemed always ambivalent about Tissot, disparaging his successful career in England in an 1874 journal entry terming Tissot an “ingenious exploiter of English idiocy,” but nevertheless had Tissot illustrate the novel he wrote with his brother, Renée Mauperin, published in 1884, with the main character modeled by Kathleen Newton.]

Portrait of Marie Joseph Robert Anatole, Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac. Arrangement in Black and Gold (1891/92), by James McNeill Whistler. (Wiki)

And my new research finds that on May 30, 1894 Tissot was among the guests at the extravagant garden party given by poet, bibliophile and Society taste-maker Robert, Comte de Montesquiou. The highbrow “fête littéraire” was in celebration of his 458 million franc restoration of an eighteenth-century pavilion in Versailles, half a mile from the palace. The event featured an entire orchestra playing from a garden grove, and Sarah Bernhardt was one of the three stars of the Parisian stage who performed for the aristocrats and luminaries under the canvas roof of a rococo theater built in the center of the garden, surrounded by blue hydrangeas. During a brief intermission, guests could amble into Montesquiou’s Japanese greenhouse, filled with chrysanthemums, potted bonsai, and rare plants and birds.

Princes and princesses, counts and countesses – almost all of the gratin, or upper crust, turned out, including a few of the club members who commissioned Tissot to portray them in his 1868 group portrait, The Circle of the Rue Royale, Comte Étienne de Ganay (1833-1903) and Marquis Alfred du Lau d’Allemans (1833-1919). Tissot was socializing among the most exclusive Belle Époque Society.

Other illustrious guests included the glamorous 33-year-old, Worth-gowned Élisabeth, the Comtesse Greffulhe, who helped establish the art of American-born painter James Whistler and actively promoted artists including French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, sculptor Auguste Rodin, and Parisian Society portraitist Antonio de la Gándara.

La comtesse Greffulhe, 1895, by Paul Nadar. (Wiki)

The Comtesse Greffulhe and the host, her uncle, were among the eccentrics who served as inspiration for characters in Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927). Proust, then an unknown university student invited only to write about the party, described it all in detail in Le Gaulois the next day, using the pseudonym “Tout-Paris.” He likened it to a dream, “where, for a few hours, we believed we were living in the days of Louis XIV!”

Tissot knew and was on friendly terms with many of the famous guests, including Gándara, Paris-based Italian painter Giovanni Boldini, and painter Paul Helleu, who was introduced to Tissot in London by Jacques-Emile Blanche in 1885.

Tissot’s good friend, writer Julia Daudet, was there. At some time during 1885, she had arranged a match between Tissot and Louise Riesener, (1860 – 1944), the granddaughter of portrait painter Henri Riesener (1767 – 1828), and a daughter of the painter Léon Riesener (1808-1878). The 25-year-old Louise, whom Tissot depicted as The Sphinx (Woman in an Interior) in his La Femme à Paris series, broke the engagement to the 49-year-old Tissot after seeing him at an unflattering angle in a foyer.

James Tissot, 1898

Also present at the party was author and journalist Aurélien Scholl (1833 – 1902), who in the months either before or after this engagement was pursuing, along with Tissot, a curvaceous circus performer depicted in a form-fitting costume and pink tights in another painting from La Femme à Paris, L’Acrobate (The Tightrope Dancer, 1883-85).

But these romances were long over. In 1895, Tissot exhibited the complete series of 365 Life of Christ illustrations in Paris, making arrangements for their publication. At about the same time, he was busy working as a Society portraitist. Tissot’s pastel portrait, Portrait of a Young Woman in a Conservatory, was completed in 1895, and two other pastels, Comtesse d’Yanville and Her Four Children and The Princesse de Broglie, date from about that year.

The Princesse de Broglie (c. 1895), by James Tissot. Pastel on linen. Private collection. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

The Princess de Broglie, née Louise Marie Madeleine Leboeuf de Montgermont (1869-1929), was the daughter of a diplomat and the granddaughter of the owner of the Creil-Montereau faience factory and regent of the Banque de France. In 1886, she bought the Hôtel de Castries, a Paris mansion built in the late seventeenth century, and in 1890, she married Prince Louis Antoine de Broglie-Revel (1862-1958) at the neo-Gothic Basilica of Saint Clotilde in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In Tissot’s portrait, she was still in her twenties, mother to two of the five children she would bear. The Princesse de Broglie, and perhaps Tissot’s other sitters, attended the Comte de Montesquiou’s garden party in 1894, certainly an excellent business opportunity for Tissot.

Robert de Montesquiou (1896), by Giovanni Boldini (Wiki)

Montesquiou was a snob with a venomous tongue, but he and Tissot were friends and fellow collectors, sharing an interest in japonisme and the fashion for spiritualism and séances.

On December 15, 1895, a glowing, even fawning, nine-page review on Tissot’s Life of Christ illustrations appeared in the glossy magazine Revue Illustré – written by the Comte de Montesquiou, a contributor to numerous periodicals from June 1894 to February 1900.

Montesquiou noted, “We owe it to the kindness of MM. Mame, the publishers of the marvelous work, La Vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ, the good fortune of reproducing here some of the most beautiful of Tissot’s compositions.” In fact, the good fortune was Tissot’s – after ten years of labor, albeit amid the splendid distractions of the Belle Époque, he had arranged with the firm Mame et fils, of Tours, to publish the pictures in 1896-97, and the reproduction rights of their two editions would make him far wealthier than he had ever been.

Related posts:

Belle Époque Portraits in Pastel by James Tissot

Tissot’s Romances

The Company He Kept: James Tissot’s Friends

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

Tissot’s La Femme à Paris series

© 2019 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

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

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

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

James Tissot, 1898

In 1896, James Tissot embarked on his third and final voyage to the Middle East to begin an illustrated Old Testament [published in 1904]. He was sixty, making yet another long working journey, this time for a new project. On the ship, English painter and illustrator George Percy Jacomb-Hood (1857 – 1929) encountered Tissot and found him “a very neatly dressed, elegant figure, with a grey military moustache and beard…gloved and groomed as if for the boulevard.”

Tissot arranged with the firm Mame et fils, of Tours, to publish his Life of Christ illustrations in France in 1896-97.

He received a million francs for the reproduction rights of their two editions – a regular one, and a deluxe version printed on handmade paper with silk bindings, enclosed in wooden boxes – printed in Paris by Lemercier, with Tissot’s close supervision of the color plates. The first twenty copies of the deluxe edition were sold for 5,000 francs each, and advance subscriptions were sold to such luminaries as the Czar of Russia, the Queen of Spain, Tolstoy, and Sarah Bernhardt. Mame presented a copy to Félix Faure, the president of France.

Our Lord Jesus Christ (Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

To promote sales, Tissot’s illustrations were exhibited at the Lemercier Gallery in London in 1896, and Mame exhibited reproductions alongside the original watercolors in Paris in May, 1897. That exhibition was extended into June when 20,000 visitors packed the gallery in the first two weeks.

The Life of Christ was published in New York in 1896-97 and in an autograph edition in 1898.

Tissot corresponded with William Gladstone in 1897, in reference to his Bible illustrations, a year before the former British Prime Minister’s death. Gladstone wrote to him that his New Testament was “a remarkable work by a remarkable man.” The Life of Christ was published in London in 1897-98, with a dedication to Gladstone; a new edition was published there in 1898-99.

In February, 1898, Tissot traveled to New York to arrange the tour of his Life of Christ illustrations. He made a second trip to the United States in October, first visiting Chicago to arrange the tour of the Life of Christ illustrations, then returning to New York for the exhibition opening.

A female reporter for the Chicago Post met Tissot strolling around the Art Institute where his watercolors soon would be exhibited, and she described him as a man with “a gray mustache as fine as General Miller’s own, [in] an eminently easy, up-to-date English business suit.”

He took the reporter off guard by telling her he planned to tour Chicago’s famous stockyards during his stay. She had heard the rumor that Tissot was about to retire to a Trappist monastery; this idea seemed based on the fact that the Château de Buillon near Besançon in eastern France, which he had inherited from his father in 1888, had been built on the site of a twelfth-century Cistercian monastery.

The Château de Buillon, along the Loue River (Wikimedia.org)

Antonio de la Gándara, self-portrait c. 1895 (Wiki)

During one of Tissot’s two 1898 trips to New York, he met with Parisian Society portraitist Antonio de la Gándara (1861-1917) at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, opened in 1893 on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 33^rd Street. The two painters, who both socialized with the eccentric dandy and snob Robert, Comte de Montesquiou at his opulent home in Versailles, shared the Comte’s interest in japonisme as well as in spiritualism and séances, or “turn-table exercises,” such as those pursued at painter Madeleine Lemaire’s salon. Built by millionaire developer William Waldorf Astor, the Waldorf Hotel catered to the upper crust of New York Society and to distinguished foreign visitors.

Waldorf Hotel, New York, 1893 (Wikimedia)

Tissot was worldly enough to have been aware of the decadent, Versailles-themed Gilded Age costume ball given at the Waldorf Hotel by Bradley Martin, a New York lawyer, and his wife Cornelia on February 10, 1897 – outraging the nation with its extravagance after two decades of economic depression and high unemployment.

On that night, police guarded the entrances, protecting the guests arriving in their fine carriages from the public gawkers, and once inside, liveried attendants guided them upstairs and through the corridors to rose-filled dressing rooms.

The sight of the guests descending the stairs to the ballroom “recalled some old picture of a stately court function in one of the capitals of Europe,” and in the ballroom, it seemed as if “some fairy god-mother, in a dream, had revived the glories of the past.” The women, fifty of whom were dressed as Marie Antoinette, were festooned with “thousand millions of dollars in precious stones,” according to The New York Times, some of which had been purchased from the sale of the French crown jewels in May, 1887.

The ball, with its 28-course supper of caviar-stuffed oysters, lobster à la Newburg, roast English suckling pig, terrapin, and canvasback duck stuffed with truffles, included four thousand bottles of 1884 Moët et Chandon, at a cost of $369,000 (over £ 7 million today).

Though the play-acting by New York’s wealthy at being Old World aristocrats was galling to the American public, James Tissot recently had participated in the real thing: his friend the Comte de Montesquiou’s extravagant garden party at his eighteenth-century pavilion in Versailles, in the spring of 1894, which Marcel Proust likened to a dream, “where, for a few hours, we believed we were living in the days of Louis XIV!”

Bradley-Martin Ball of 1897 from the Harper’s Weekly Illustrated Newspaper (Wiki)

Madison Square looking north, Manhattan, New York City, in 1893 (Wikipedia.org)

On November 15, 1898, the day after the Life of Christ exhibition opened at the American Art Galleries at Madison Square South, The New York Times ran a rather lukewarm review on Tissot’s Bible illustrations: “It is claimed for M. Tissot by his friends and admirers that he is one of the few artists of modern times who has attempted an artistic rendition of episodes in the life of Christ in a  truly devotional spirit and without thought of gain, and as proof of this they point to his piety and to his intense religious convictions. It is not necessary or advisable to start a controversy on this question.” The reviewer continued, “As to how individual transcriptions of this or that episode will impress the visitor it is of course impossible to say,” and while admitting that Tissot’s pictures “are worthy of reverent study,” and “certainly original,” added, “but one person will be impressed here and there, where another will see only what is bizarre or curious.”

Three days later, after calling on Archbishop Corrigan, Tissot was dragged nearly a block when trying to board a Madison Avenue line trolley car, leaving him bruised and unnerved. He was 62 years old.

A long article, “A Believer’s Pictures of Christ,” by Charles De Kay, appeared in The New York Times on December 11, 1898, stating, “Tissot is a straightforward, honest believer in the existence and Godhead of the Saviour.” Illustrated with six of Tissot’s pen and ink drawings, the article concluded, “Tissot’s scenes and glimpses from the life of Christ cannot fail to charm all serious souls.”

Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me (Laisser venir à moi les petits enfants, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

The Ascension (L’Ascension, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

Tissot’s New Testament watercolors toured New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Toronto, Boston, St. Louis, Omaha, and other cities through 1899, to adoring crowds who by the end of the decade brought Tissot the huge sum of $100,000 in entrance fees. The astonishing financial success of Biblical works put him a bit on the defensive: he seemed to feel the need to emphasize his personal piety amid the profits.

Tissot’s “friends and admirers” certainly would have included the late, acclaimed French artist Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815 – 1891), whom Tissot used to entertain in his Paris villa during his heyday under the Second Empire. In 1897, Meissonier’s biographer noted that he was very proud of Tissot, one of his protégés, whose career he followed closely, and who fulfilled the hopes he entertained of his future. According to Meissonier, “Tissot has noble visions. He is in love with the ideal. He devotes himself entirely to religious subjects now. He wanders in Palestine, among the scenes of the great events of the Gospels…”

© 2019 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

Related posts:

Portrait of the Pilgrim: James Tissot’s Reinvention (1885-1895)

Belle Époque Portraits in Pastel by James Tissot

The Company He Kept: James Tissot’s Friends

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

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

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

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

April 1 is my birthday, and I write an annual April Fool’s Day post, so here’s something fun: an illustrated timeline of James Tissot’s life in Paris during La Belle Époque. It puts him in the context of his time, and it provides us a little escapism.

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)

Cortège toward the Panthéon with Victor Hugo’s coffin, Paris, June 1, 1885 (Wikipedia.org)

In 1885, Tissot’s La Femme à Paris series was exhibited at Galerie Sedelmeyer, Paris, along with his collection of the cloisonné enamels he created. Upon his return to Paris after living in England for eleven years following the Franco-Prussian War, he intended this series to reestablish his place in the French art world, but it was not well received.

June 1, 1885 was a day of national mourning for the death of poet and novelist Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885), revered as a national hero for his passionate defense of democracy as well as his contributions to French culture. He had requested a pauper’s funeral but was given a state funeral, and more than two million people followed his coffin as the cortège carried it from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, where he was buried.

The Tight-Rope Walker (c. 1885), by Jean-Louis Forain. Art Institute of Chicago. (Wikimedia.org)

Two days before Hugo’s death, Tissot participated in a séance in London, where he exchanged kisses with an apparition he believed to be his late mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton (1854–1882).

During this year, he became engaged to Louise Riesener (1860 – 1944), daughter of painter Léon Riesener, but she was 25 and he was 49, and she changed her mind.

Tissot also had a brief romance with a tightrope walker in a Paris circus.

Tissot joined the new Société de pastellistes français and exhibited his work. From the mid-1880s to the early 1890s, he executed about forty portraits of aristocratic and Society women, most often in pastel.

Portrait of Clotilde Briatte, Comtesse Pillet-Will (c. 1883 – 1885), by James Tissot. Pastel on linen. Private collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Caricature of Gustave Eiffel, Le Temps, February 14, 1887.

In 1886, Tissot exhibited his La Femme à Paris series at Arthur Tooth and Sons, London as “Pictures of Parisian Life by J.J. Tissot”; they were not well received. In Paris, he exhibited with the Société d’aquarellistes français.

But in 1885, James Tissot had a religious revelation, in the Saint-Sulpice church in Paris, and he decided he would dedicate the rest of his life to illustrating of the Bible. Between October 1886 and March 1887, he traveled to the Middle East to research his illustrated Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ  visiting sites in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria to make his work as authentic and realistic as possible.

While Tissot was abroad, work began on an iron tower on the Champs de Mars, to be a centerpiece for the 1889 Exposition Universelle: the foundations of the Eiffel Tower were laid in late January, 1887. A “Committee of Three Hundred” – the most important figures in the cultural life of France – protested that this “gigantic black smokestack” would dominate Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, and other monuments in Paris “in this ghastly dream.”

There is no indication of Tissot’s opinion on Eiffel’s tower; the United Kingdom, rather than Paris, seemed to be his focus. In 1887, he exhibited at least one painting, Waiting for the Ferry at the Falcon Tavern (1874), at Nottingham Castle and at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and in 1888, he exhibited three works at the International Exhibition, Glasgow.

Eiffel Tower: Installation of the pillars above the first level (May 15, 1888). (Wikimedia.org)

Construction on the Eiffel Tower was proceeding steadily, and by the end of the year, Tissot would have been able to see it from the villa he had built in 1867 near the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne, at the far west end of what is now avenue Foch.

In 1888, Tissot’s father died, leaving him the Château de Buillon, near Besançon, in eastern France. During his remaining years, Tissot lived partly at his villa in Paris and partly at the Château.

Central Dome of the World Fair in Paris, 1889 (1890), by Louis Béroud (Wikimedia.org)

But Tissot exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, winning a gold medal for his Prodigal Son series.

Café Tortoni (1889), by Paul Renouard. (Wikimedia.org)

La Pâtisserie Gloppe au Champs-Élysées (1889), ), by Jean Béraud. (Wikipedia.org)

The Bar at Maxim’s (c. 1895), by Pierre-Victor Galland. (Wikimedia.org)

At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance (1889-90), by
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Wikipedia.org)

It seems unlikely that Tissot avoided the sophisticated delights of Paris, including its café culture, but in 1889, he left for his second journey to the Middle East to research his illustrated Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

In 1893, focusing on the art market beyond France, he exhibited in the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, displaying his Prodigal Son series and one of his pastel portraits.

Jesus Goes Up Alone onto a Mountain to Pray (Jésus monte seul sur une montagne pour prier, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

Caricature of Alphonse Daudet, Vanity Fair, March 11, 1893.

But after his long absence as a prominent artist in Paris, James Tissot stole the show at the Salon of 1894.

He exhibited 270 of the ultimate total of 365 drawings for La Vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (The Life of Christ).

The pictures were given a gallery and a special catalogue. The public reaction was astonishing: one headline read, “THE CHAMP DE MARS SALON; JAMES TISSOT’S LIFE OF CHRIST A MARVELOUS SERIES. Women Weep as They Pass from Picture to Picture.”

Tissot’s achievement was the talk of Paris; at a dinner party on May 6, 1894 given by Tissot’s longtime friends Alphonse and Julia Daudet, celebrated writer Émile Zola said he was “captivated” by Tissot’s Bible illustrations.

The Princesse de Broglie (c. 1895), by James Tissot.

Gismonda (1894), by Alphonse Mucha (Wiki)

James Tissot’s presence at Robert, Comte de Montesquiou’s extravagant “fête littéraire” at Versailles in 1894, along with princes and princesses, counts and countesses, indicates that Tissot socialized among the upper echelon of Parisian Society, where he found many of the subjects for his pastel portraits.

On January 1, 1895, Parisians awoke to find a startling, life-sized advertisement for Victorien Sardou’s play Gismonda starring Sarah Bernhardt at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris posted on the streets.

Designed by an unknown Czech, Alphonse Mucha, the poster almost immediately was pulled down by collectors.

Summer (1878), by James Tissot.

Summer (1896), by Alphonse Mucha.

The new style, or Art Nouveau, was emerging throughout Europe, inspired by the natural, curving lines of plants and flowers. It influenced the decorative arts, architecture, interior design, jewelry, furniture, and fashion. James Tissot’s “modern art” of the 1870s and 1880s was completely outdated, and his realization of this must have contributed to his dedication to his Bible illustrations, which he considered historical accurate and therefore timeless.

In 1895, Tissot exhibited his entire series of 365 Life of Christ illustrations in Paris, and he exhibited the next year in London. La Vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ was published in France, and he received a million francs for the reproduction rights. In 1896, he made a third trip to the Middle East, this time to begin an illustrated Old Testament (which would be published in 1904, two years after his death).

Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, in front of rue de la Lune (1897), by Clément Maurice, PARIS, Paris en plein air, Le Beau Pays de France. (Wikimedia.org)

L’heure des fiacres (1897), by Clément Maurice, PARIS, Paris en plein air, Le Beau Pays de France. (Wikimedia.org)

About this time, Tissot began work in Paris on a colossal Christ Pantocrator for the high altar of the convent church of the Dominicans in the rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

In 1897, he exhibited his Life of Christ illustrations at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and The Life of Our Saviour Jesus Christ was published in London and New York. In December, there was a dedication ceremony for his completed Christ Pantocrator.

The church of the convent of the Annunciation, built in 1860: No. 222 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honore, Paris 8th. Christ Pantocrator painted by James Tissot and installed in 1897. (Wikimedia.org)

Interior of the church of the convent of the Annunciation. (Wikimedia.org)

Paris, in preparation for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, was growing: the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais were under construction as exhibition halls, and the Alexandre III bridge and the Gare d’Orsay were being built to facilitate the movement of the influx of visitors.

But James Tissot was busy arranging the North American tour of his Life of Christ illustrations. In February, 1898, he visited New York, and in October, he traveled to Chicago, then returned to New York for the opening of his exhibition. His New Testament watercolors toured New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Toronto, Boston, St. Louis, Omaha, and other cities through 1899, to adoring crowds.

Place du Théâtre Français, Paris: Rain (1898), by Camille Pissarro. Minneapolis Museum of Art. Minneapolis Museum of Art. (Wikimedia.org)

The Exposition Universelle was held in Paris from April 14 to November 12, 1900, and nearly fifty million people visited it.

James Tissot, now 64 years old, did not display any of his work.

In 1900, at the end of the North American tour, Tissot’s Life of Christ water-colors and pen-and-ink drawings were purchased by the rapidly expanding Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, now the Brooklyn Museum; the museum’s trustees wanted to attract the crowds that flocked to Tissot’s exhibitions. Tissot set the price at $60,000, an enormous sum that was raised by public donations.

Gare d’Orsay, Paris, Paris-Orléans railway, c. 1900 (Wikipedia.org)

Pont Alexandre III, Paris, c. 1900.  (Wikipedia.org)

Le Petit Palais, c 1900 (Wikimedia.org)

View of the Champ-de-Mars towards the Château d’eau, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900.  (Wikimedia.org)

Panoramic view of the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900. (Wikipedia.org)

Porte Dauphine at the Bois de Boulogne, by Joaquín Pallarés Allustante (Wiki)

Beginning in 1898, the Paris Métro was under construction. Hector Guimard (1867 – 1942) designed roofed Art Nouveau entrances to the various métro stations. One, the Porte Dauphine station, was built adjacent to Tissot’s villa in the avenue du Bois de Boulogne. Opened in 1900, it is the only original (not reconstructed) Guimard Métro station entrance still on its original site. It was restored in 1999.

James Tissot died in 1902. It is believed that his Paris villa, once visited by “all the princes and princesses,” was demolished in 1906.

Art Nouveau entrance to the Porte Dauphine Métro station in the 16^th arrondissement of Paris, designed by Hector Guimard and opened in 1900. (Wikipedia.org)

© 2019 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

Related posts:

Belle Époque Portraits in Pastel by James Tissot

Paris, June 1871

The high life, 1868: Tissot, his villa & The Circle of the Rue Royale

Paris c. 1865: The Giddy Life of Second Empire France

The James Tissot Tour of Paris

Previous April Fool’s Day posts:

The Missing Tissot Nudes

Was James Tissot a Plagiarist?

Tissot and his Friends Clown Around

Happy Hour with James Tissot

Tissot’s Tiger Skin: A Prominent Prop

James Tissot, the painter art critics love to hate

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

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

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

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

James Tissot, having devoted years researching and completing his Life of Christ illustrations, did not leave his reputation to his friends.

The Sermon of the Beatitudes (La sermon des béatitudes, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

In March, 1899, an eleven-page article on Tissot and his Christianity and art appeared in McClure’s Magazine. Written by Cleveland Moffett, a 36-year-old American journalist, the article was based on personal interviews with the artist, now 62, over several weeks.

It begins with a long shot of Tissot’s lone figure on a cliff, standing in rugged travel garb with his hands at his hips, surveying a vast desert landscape, over the caption, “The Place where the Sermon on the Mount was Pronounced” – along with a reproduction of Tissot’s watercolor, The Sermon on the Mount (right), showing the same landscape, this time crowded, with Jesus standing on the spot where Tissot was photographed. The awestruck Moffett extols Tissot’s “vigor” and describes him at the outset: “the spiritual quality in this distinguished artist is one of his most striking characteristics. Not only is he deeply religious in his daily life, but he is something beyond that: he is a mystic and a seer of visions.”

The Procession in the Streets of Jerusalem (Le cortège dans les rues de Jérusalem, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

Moffett described Tissot’s earlier career, supplanted by his new religious fervor: “And now in the East a star of guidance shone out clear, a sign in the heavens beckoning this man, calling him to Jerusalem, and he heard the call and answered it.”

Moffet recorded Tissot’s anecdotes of his travels. In November, 1886, approaching Jerusalem in the rain, Tissot reprimanded the guide for suggesting a short cut: “Do you think I have traveled two thousand miles to have my first impression spoiled? Do you think I have come here like a scampering tourist?”

Tissot also told Moffett how he painted his pictures – and that “many of his best pictures were never painted at all, because the very gorgeousness of the scene made it slip from him as a dream vanishes, and it would not come back. ‘Oh,’ he sighed, ‘the things that I have seen in the life of Christ, but could not remember! They were too splendid to keep.’”

What Our Lord Saw from the Cross (Ce que voyait Notre-Seigneur sur la Croix, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

In 1900, Tissot entered into partnership with the McClure Company of New York to publish The Life of Christ, previously published in New York by L. Weiss & Co. (1896-97) and Doubleday (1898).

Tissot’s talent for publicizing his piety while monetizing his Christianity did not sit well with some of his friends.

Edmond de Goncourt, a cynical observer of those around him and whose novel, Renée Mauperin (1884), Tissot had illustrated, did not find him credible; Goncourt wrote in his journal in January, 1890, “Tissot, this complex being, with his mysticism and cunning, this intelligent worker, despite his unintelligent skull and his eyes of a cooked whiting, was passionate, finding every two or three years a new passion, with which he contracted a new little lease on his life.”

Edgar Degas, once one of Tissot’s closest friends, had a different reaction to his success: fury. He wrote in a letter to Ludovic Halévy, “Now he’s got religion. He says he experiences inconceivable joy in his faith. At the same time he not only sells his own products high but sells his friends’ pictures as well…To think we lived together as friends and then…Well, I can take my vengeance. I shall do a caricature of Tissot with Christ behind him, whipping him, and call it Christ driving His Merchant from the Temple. My God!”

The Merchants Chased from the Temple (Les vendeurs chassés du Temple, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

The Bad Rich Man in Hell (Le mauvais riche dans l’Enfer, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

While Tissot was not alone in selling works bought from Degas or received from him as gifts, he did sell at least two. In 1890, Tissot sold Degas’ Horses in a Meadow (1872) for an unknown amount to art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who kept it until his death in 1922. Durand-Ruel actually had purchased the picture from Degas in 1872 and sold it in January, 1874 for under 1,000 francs to Paris opera baritone Jean Baptiste Faure (1830-1914). Faure returned it to Degas, who gave it as a gift to James Tissot. Several years later, on January 11, 1897, Tissot sold a painting that Degas had given him as a gift in 1876, right after finishing it – a portrait of a woman named Lyda, titled Woman with Binoculars. Tissot received 1,500 francs from Durand-Ruel for the picture; Durand-Ruel sold it to H. Paulus that November for 6,000 francs. After keeping the picture for over twenty years, why did Tissot sell it – especially for a mere 1,500 francs when it was worth four times that? [Tissot sold Manet’s Blue Venice in 1891, possibly at a profit, after Manet’s 1883 death had made his work valuable; he bought it on March 24, 1875 for 2,500 francs, after the two painters had traveled to Venice together, and Manet badly needed the income.]

Jesus Goes Up Alone onto a Mountain to Pray (Jésus monte seul sur une montagne pour prier, 1886-1894), by James Tissot. Watercolor. Brooklyn Museum. (Wikimedia.org)

But any profit realized by the sale of these paintings paled in comparison to the income the French painter in the English business suit was earning from his own work.

In 1900, at the end of the North American tour, James Tissot’s Life of Christ water-colors and pen-and-ink drawings were purchased by the rapidly expanding Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, now the Brooklyn Museum, as advised by the painter John Singer Sargent. Sargent referred to Tissot as “a dealer of genius,” but the museum’s trustees wanted to attract the crowds that flocked to Tissot’s exhibitions.

Tissot set the price for these 540 works – he refused to allow them to be sold separately – at the substantial price of $60,000. The money was raised by public subscription.

According to the museum’s website, “Every two or three days, newspaper headlines in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle urged the borough to ‘Bring the Tissot Pictures Here.’ The Eagle published the names of the donors and the amounts they had pledged toward the acquisition, which the paper described as ‘the most important contribution to the knowledge of the life of Christ that has been given to mankind in the form of art since the creations of the great masters of the Italian, Spanish and Dutch schools of painting.’” Subscriptions flowed in at the rate of $300 – $1,000 per day for several months.

In 1992, the Brooklyn Museum acquired a sketchbook of studies Tissot made during his research trips to the Middle East.

Tissot’s Life of Christ illustrations, not currently on view, were last exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 2009-2010.

© 2019 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

Related posts:

Portrait of the Pilgrim: James Tissot’s Reinvention (1885-1895)

Portrait of the Pilgrim: “not necessary or advisable to start a controversy” (1896-1898)

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

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

James Tissot began a follow-up series to his 1883-85 series of large-scale paintings, La Femme à Paris (The Parisian Woman), to be called L’Etrangère (The Foreign Woman), but he only completed two canvases. The first, L’Esthétique (The Aesthetic Woman, or In the Louvre, 1883-1885), entered the renowned Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian art collection of the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1962.

The other, La Voyageuse (The Embarkation at Calais, or The Traveller, 1883-1885), is in the collection of the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (The Royal Museum of Fine Arts), Antwerp, and I was able to view it a few weeks ago. It is known there as The Embarkation at Calais.

The Embarkation at Calais, by James Tissot. (Oil on canvas,
146.5 by 102 by 1.7 cm).  The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp (Photo: Wikimedia.org).

In this lively scene, a beautiful, fashionable, and confident woman descends a ship’s gangplank unaccompanied, surrounded by fellow travelers, sailors, and laborers. You can hear the shouts and sounds of the dock workers, the thumping footfall of the porter bearing her trunk, and the din of the genteel stampede behind her.

“Goodbye” – On the Mersey (c. 1881), by James Tissot. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

In mid-1871, following the Franco-Prussian War and the bloody days of the Commune, James Tissot moved to London.

Around 1876, he met Kathleen Newton, who moved in with him and became his principal model. Mrs. Newton, a divorcée with two children, died of tuberculosis on November 9, 1882, at age 28, at Tissot’s villa in suburban St. John’s Wood.

Immediately after her funeral on November 14, Tissot returned to Paris, beside himself with grief [see James Tissot’s garden idyll & Kathleen Newton’s death.]

The Embarkation at Calais seems to portray an English woman, connected with his images of Kathleen Newton travelling [see Victorians on the Move, by James Tissot].

In fact, if you look closely just behind the woman’s head, you’ll see a ghostly figure of a woman wearing Mrs. Newton’s distinctive triple-caped greatcoat and high black bonnet. The face is not Kathleen’s though; it’s as if Tissot has put her unforgettable garb on some anonymous stand-in.

Portrait of Arthur d’Echerac (1883, etching), by Félix Barcquemond.

The Embarkation at Calais was exhibited at Galerie Sedelmeyer, Paris, in 1885. In 1903, about twenty years after Tissot painted it, it was donated to The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp by Belgian art collector, art dealer, and critic Paul Leroi (Léon Gauchez 1825-1907).

It is interesting that Leroi, who from 1875 to the year of his death co-published the illustrated weekly magazine, L’art, owned this picture; in 1885, L’art printed an unflattering review of Tissot’s La Femme à Paris series by G. Dargenty [pseudonym of the sculptor, public administrator and art critic Arthur Auguste d’Echérac (1832-1919)] that referred to the central figures as “graceful puppets put into movement on the stage where they are used to performing, who call for neither commentary nor notes, inspire neither admiration nor repugnance nor desires, and are content to be interesting and pleasant to see.”

The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp has been closed for renovation since late 2011. Tissot’s painting, displayed in Antwerp, the Netherlands, and Honfleur, France over the past decade and a half, was last exhibited in public in “James Tissot: 1836-1902” (September 26, 2015 – February 21, 2016), held at the Palazzo Montoro in Rome, Italy. Now in storage in the museum’s facility in Kallo, about twenty minutes outside Antwerp in the harbor, it was made available for me to view by the accommodating staff.

My embarkation at Antwerp, in the splendid Central Station (c. 1905)

At first glance, it is an odd picture for Tissot – cheerless, using the thick, dry pigment that characterized his La Femme à Paris series but in a dark palette of browns, greys and blues with touches of burnt sienna for contrast. It’s as if Tissot has lost his direction, attempting to soldier on in the vein of the unsuccessful La Femme à Paris but without the passion that animated that project.

He had left his shining, enameled Academic style behind when he emigrated to England in mid-1871, but in this painting, there is none of the palpable self-confidence, exuberant brushwork, or wit, that characterized his best work throughout the 1870s, and in his remaining years with Kathleen Newton. Yet in its myriad vignettes, Tissot still shows his fascination with individual faces and human emotion. Even dejected and directionless, he can’t create a composition that doesn’t brim with life. This is the quality that Vincent van Gogh described in a letter to his brother, Theo, on September 24, 1880:

“A discerning critic once rightly said of James Tissot, ‘He is a troubled soul.’  However this may be, there is something of the human soul in his work and that is why he is great, immense, infinite…”

The museum staff kindly shared a high-resolution image for this article, so let’s enjoy some of Tissot’s details.

In his expression, his shoulders and his hands, we can see how the porter strains under his heavy load.

The crowd on the pier is so detailed, it seems copied from a photograph.

A rather smug-looking couple glances curiously at the central figure – or at us?

A young mother protectively hurries her two little daughters through the throng.

A dock worker squats, his strong hands anticipating the next task.

The captain automatically offers his hand, though the lady is managing well on her own, while the laborers to his right go about their business.

We can tell how loudly this worker must shout to be heard.

Another dock worker quietly concentrates on the job at hand.

We see no heels on the lady’s narrow leather boots, and so she appears to float.

Tissot again demonstrates his love of painting plaid.

The lady’s movement is suggested by the wrinkles in her gloves and the drape of her skirt.

A beautiful face, a self-possessed demeanor.

There is something ethereal about this veiled woman, so weightless on those tiny feet, and strangely detached from the humanity surrounding her. Is she alone, or is the mysterious, headless man behind her actually with her? Overall, this is an unexpectedly haunting and somewhat sad painting of what it feels like to be lonely in a crowd of strangers: everyone is busy with their own tasks and emotional life, and not one of these people is engaged with any of the others. There is a strong sense in The Embarkation at Calais that, rather than portraying the life around him, James Tissot was inadvertently portraying his own psychological state at this time, between Kathleen Newton’s death and his imminent, abrupt reincarnation as a Bible illustrator. The Embarkation at Calais is significant in that this was Tissot’s last painting of “modern life.”

With special thanks to the following staff

at Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen:

Fleur Van Paassen, Registrar

Johan Willems, Depot Manager

Madeleine ter Kuile, Imaging Manager

Note: High-resolution of The Embarkation at Calais © Hugo Maertens, Bruges

© 2019 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

Related posts:

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

Tissot in the U.S.: The Speed Museum, Kentucky

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

A Closer Look: The Circus Lover (The Amateur Circus), by James Tissot

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

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

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

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

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 large work  shows the young countess in a richly decorated interior, surrounded by her children in white pinafores (left to right): Isaure and Simone in the background, and in the foreground, Daniel and Nicole. The woman in this aristocratic picture is wealthy and privileged, but she knew a great deal of heartbreak.

The Comtesse d’Yanville and Her Four Children (c. 1895), by James Tissot. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

The Comtesse d’Yanville was Henriette-Marguerite Vivier-Deslandes (1864-1932), daughter of Baron Émile-Auguste Vivier-Deslandes (1832-1917) and Émilie Caroline Simone Hélène Oppenheim (1840-1866), a woman of German origin who died when she was two.

Portrait of Dr. Gerard Encausse, dit Papus (1899), by Baron Deslandes.

Her father, who was born in Florence, Italy, was in his youth a French naval officer who received the Médaille Militaire, was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1858, and became an administrator and diplomat.

A descendent of Pauline Bonaparte, sister of Napoléon I, he was created the first Baron Vivier-Deslandes by Napoléon III in 1862, the year of his marriage, through the resurrection of an extinct family title.

His maternal grandmother, Angelica Catalani (1780-1849) had been painted by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. He became a painter who by 1894 was an associate of the Society of French artists, exhibiting in the Salon as Baron Deslandes.

In 1886, his daughter Marguerite married Marie Thibaud Pierre Henry Coustant, the second Comte d’Yanville (1865-1951), a sportsman who soon became a prominent coach racer, photographed many times for Universal Sport Illustrated. He participated in the Paris-Deauville excursion of 1905.

The couple quickly had four children, beginning with three daughters: Simone (1887-1963), Isaure (1888-1966), and Nicole (1889-1977).

Their son, Daniel, was born in late 1890, and was killed in action weeks before his twenty-fourth birthday on November 4, 1914, at Mont-Kemmel, Heuvelland (Belgium). He was a Second Lieutenant in the 5th Dragoon Regiment and is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. He was characterized as earnest, upright, and devoted to his country. His father said as he was leaving to fight for his country, “Pray God that you may come back safe”, and Daniel responded “No! Pray rather that I may do my duty, and more than my duty.” Daniel was well regarded by the men he led, according to an account by The Beaumont Union, and he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. When breaking the news of his son’s death to Comte d’Yanville, his Colonel called him “a young officer full of gaiety, vigour and courage who rightly looked forward to a brilliant future.” He was struck by a shell and killed instantly.

Daniel’s name lived on. His sister, Simone, married Guy de la Mure Riviera (1870-1957) in 1908. They had two daughters and two sons, the younger of whom was Daniel de Rivière de la Mure (1913-1994).

Daniel’s sister, Isaure, was married in 1920 to Comte Gaston Christyn de Ribaucourt (1882-1961). Like her mother, she had three daughters and one son, Comte Daniel Robert Henry Adolphe Christyn de Ribaucourt (1922-2007).

Leaving many descendants, the Comtesse d’Yanville, Henriette-Marguerite Vivier-Deslandes, died at her home in 56 rue des Saints-Pères, Paris on October 18, 1932, at the age of 68. Tissot’s image of her as a beautiful young mother, wearing a pale pink gown and surrounded by her four happy children, lives on.

Related posts:

Belle Époque Portraits in Pastel by James Tissot

Paris, 1885-1900

Portrait of the Pilgrim: James Tissot’s Reinvention (1885-1895)

Portrait of the Pilgrim: “not necessary or advisable to start a controversy” (1896-1898)

Portrait of the Pilgrim: “a dealer of genius” (1899-1900)

© 2019 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

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

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

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

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “On Holiday with James Tissot and Kathleen Newton, by Lucy Paquette for The Victorian Web.” Victorian Web. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2019/07/15/on-holiday-with-james-tissot-and-kathleen-newton-in-1878-by-lucy-paquette-for-the-victorian-web/. Web. Date viewed.

James Tissot and Kathleen Newton lived in relative seclusion during their years together in London, from about 1876 until her death from tuberculosis in late 1882, but they enjoyed numerous trips outside the city in 1878.

Partly, as an unmarried couple living together, they were not welcome in respectable company. Kathleen’s two children lived nearby with her sister, Polly, who brought them to visit at tea time. But Tissot spent a great deal of time painting at his home, and Kathleen was his primary model during these years. Still, they managed what essentially were working holidays, when he painted her while they enjoyed excursions to resort towns easily accessible from his villa in suburban St. John’s Wood, London.

Each of their destinations had its own attractions, described in contemporary travel guides.

Greenwich

In Greenwich, Tissot painted The Terrace of the Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich, London.

The Terrace of the Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich, London (c. 1878), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 11 by 14 in. (27.94 by 35.56 cm). New Orleans Museum of Art.  (Photo: Wikiart.org)

On the south bank of the Thames, Greenwich was four miles from London by road and railway, and five or six miles by river from London Bridge; steamers ran every half hour. The parish of Greenwich had a population of 40,412 in 1871, and the town was an important manufacturing center, with engineering establishments, steel and iron works, iron steamboat yards, artificial stone and cement works, rope yards, a flax mill, and a brewery. The meandering streets,  less than picturesque at that time, held a market, a theatre, a literary institute, a lecture hall, public baths, banks, and twenty almshouses.

The glory of the town was Greenwich Hospital, a home for retired Royal Navy sailors until 1869, which commanded the view from the Thames. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, its Painted Hall contained a picture gallery that was free to the public on Monday and Friday, and four pence on other days.

London from Greenwich Park, by J.M.W. Turner (1809), Tate. (Wikipedia)

Trafalgar Tavern (1878), by James Tissot. Etching  & drypoint. Metropolitan Museum of Art; public domain.

Behind the Hospital, visitors could enjoy the beautiful 190 acres of Greenwich Park, and the view of the Royal Observatory above it. The park, designed on plans by King Louis XIV’s landscape architect, André Le Nôtre by commission of Charles II, had been magnificently terraced and planted with avenues of elms in 1664. It was now in a state of neglect but still had charming, distant views of London and the Thames for the crowds who came to enjoy the open air and the deer fearless enough to feed from visitors’ hands. On its summit was the Royal Observatory, founded by George III, and while this was not open to the public, there was an electric time-ball that fell every day at precisely 1 p.m., an electric clock, a standard barometer, and highly accurate standard measures of length for public use by the entrance gates.

The Trafalgar Tavern was one of four riverside inns operating at that time; all were known for their whitebait dinners – for diners with the means to enjoy the delicacy, seasoned with cayenne pepper and lemon juice. The Terrace of Trafalgar Tavern is inscribed “No. 1 Trafalgar Tavern/(Greenwich)/oil painting/James Tissot/17 Grove End Road/St John’s Wood/London/N.W.” on an old label on the reverse. The terrace provided extensive views of the ships on the Thames, all the way to London.

Gravesend

In 1878, the couple traveled a bit farther, to Gravesend, the setting for two versions of Waiting for the Ferry (1878).

Gravesend was accessible by numerous river steamers which conveyed crowds of passengers during the day, as well as by trains on the Tilbury Railway and the North Kent Railway; a steam-ferry transported visitors from Tilbury over to Gravesend. The trip was about 27 miles by river, or 24 miles by rail. By 1878, Gravesend had a population of 22,000, and the influx of summer visitors brought unexpected prosperity.

At that time, Gravesend fishermen hauled in shrimp in prodigious quantities, mainly for the London market, but the streets of Gravesend teemed with “tea and shrimp houses.” The formerly crowded, labyrinthine medieval old town boasted new and wider streets, and a new town with broad streets was lined with shops, homes, and lodging-houses.

While the churches and public buildings of Gravesend were of little interest to tourists, with the exception of the impressive Town Hall and the massive, “Collegiate Gothic” College for Daughters of Congregational Ministers, Milton Mount (built in 1872-73), there was a theatre, and the Assembly Rooms in Harmer Street, built in 1842 as a Literary Institute, featured a concert-room for one thousand persons, as well as billiard-rooms.

Gravesend Town Hall (Wikimedia)

The Town Hall, near the center of High Street, was built in 1836 on the site of previous town halls, and was fronted by colossal Doric columns over which a pediment featured the town arms and statues of Minerva, Justice, and Truth. Beneath the Great Hall on the main floor was the market: A corn market was held in the town on Wednesdays, a general market on Saturdays, and a cattle market monthly.

Along the river, there were barge and boat building yards, iron foundries, rope walks, breweries, steam flour mills, soap and other factories. Beyond those were market gardens, renowned for asparagus and rhubarb, and cherry and apple orchards.

Gravesend Town Pier (Wikipedia)

For visitors, the place to be was the Town Pier, with its 40-foot cast-iron arches extending 127 feet into the river. It was the landing for the London steamers and the location of the railway ticket office. Built in 1832, the Pier was covered in 1854 and featured sliding shutters on the sides, making it possible in any weather to stroll along the river. On summer days, a band played, and there were occasional balls. The favorite hotels, such as the Clarendon and the Roebuck, were located near the Pier. Bathing machines were within walking distance, and since Gravesend was the headquarters of the Royal Thames Yacht Club, watermen kept busy conveying passengers to and from the vessels anchored off the Club House on the Main Parade.

All in all, Gravesend offered plenty of entertainment to fill James Tissot’s and Kathleen Newton’s leisure hours.

Tissot painted three versions of Waiting for the Ferry, one in 1874 (Speed Museum, Kentucky), and two around 1878, at the dock beside the Old Falcon Tavern, Gravesend; Kathleen Newton modeled for the figures in only the latter two versions. She wears the same triple-caped greatcoat that Tissot portrayed her wearing in numerous other paintings, including The Terrace of the Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich, London.

Waiting for the Ferry (c. 1878), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 10 by 14 in. (26.7 by 35.6 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikiart.org)

Waiting for the Ferry (c. 1878), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 9 by 13¾ in. (22.5 by 32.5 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

While this third version of Waiting for the Ferry [above] is said to have been painted around 1878, Kathleen Newton’s son, Cecil, was born in March, 1876, and he clearly is older than two or two and a half here. In fact, it must have been painted in 1882, when Tissot painted Cecil at about six in The Garden Bench, wearing the same knit cap and brown suit. That would make the young girl in this Waiting for the Ferry Lilian Hervey, Kathleen Newton’s niece, who was seven in 1882 [Kathleen’s daughter, Muriel Violet Newton, was born in December, 1871 and would have been about ten at this time, too old to be the girl shown in this version].

Tissot, Kathleen Newton, Cecil Newton, and Lilian Hervey posed for a photograph that gives some insight into how the artist composed this later version of Waiting for the Ferry, simply painting in the background from the previous version.

Ramsgate

The farthest the couple ventured on these excursions was Ramsgate, a seaside resort on the Kent coast, seventy-eight miles southeast of central London. There, Tissot painted Seaside (July: Specimen of a Portrait, 1878) and Room Overlooking the Harbour (c. 1878-79).

Ramsgate (1876), by James Tissot. Drypoint. Metropolitan Museum of Art; public domain.

Londoners could take the train from Victoria Station to Ramsgate on the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway. A travel guide of the time highly recommended this resort, population 12,000: “It is impossible to speak too favourably of this first-rate town, its glorious sands, its bathing, its hotels, libraries, churches, etc. etc. not forgetting its bracing climate.”

“The streets of Ramsgate are well paved or macadamized, and brilliantly lighted with gas.  There are banking establishments and a savings bank, with a literary institute, assembly-rooms, a small theatre, several good libraries, dispensary, town-hall, custom-house, music-hall, gas-works, water-works &c. An excellent promenade on the West Cliff has been laid out in an ornamental manner, and forms a delightful source of healthy recreation. The bathing-machines are under the East Cliff, where also, as well as in front of the harbor, there are well-appointed warm baths, &c. The markets are extremely well supplied with meat, excellent fish, &c.; and few places on the coast are so cheap, as well as healthy and agreeable for a summer’s residence.”

Vincent Van Gogh moved to Ramsgate in April, 1876, at age 23, to work as an assistant teacher in a boys’ school for a brief time. He wrote to his brother Theo, “There’s a harbour full of all kinds of ships, closed in by stone jetties running into the sea on which one can walk. And further out one sees the sea in its natural state, and that’s beautiful.”

Ramsgate Sands in 1854, by William Powell Frith. (Wikipedia)

Ramsgate Beach, Kent, England, c. 1890/1900 (Wikipedia)

The setting for Seaside was the Royal Albion Hotel near the shore of Viking Bay in Ramsgate, Built in 1791, Albion House sits atop the East cliff, with a sweeping view of the beach and the Royal Harbour. Princess Victoria stayed in one of its elegant rooms, ornamented with Georgian and Regency cornices, iron balconies, and shutter-panelled windows, before she was crowned Queen

Kathleen wears one of the prop gowns Tissot often used, a summery white gown trimmed with lemon-yellow satin ribbons that featured in a half-dozen of his oils in the mid-1870s, including A Portrait (1876, Tate Britain), A Convalescent (c. 1876, Museums Sheffield), A Passing Storm (c. 1876, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, New Brunswick), and Spring (c. 1878, private collection).

Seaside (July: Speciman of a Portrait, 1878), by James Tissot. Oil on fabric, 87.5 x 61 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art. Open Access.

Tissot exhibited Seaside, 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.

He made a copy (now in a private collection), showing Kathleen Newton wearing a tight blonde bun. He gave this version to Emile Simon, administrator of the Théâtre l’Ambigu-Comique at 2, Boulevard Saint Martin, Paris from 1882 to 1884. Simon sold it as La Réverie in 1905; this version of Seaside (also known as July, La Réverie, and Ramsgate Harbour) is signed and inscribed: “J.J. Tissot a l’am(i) E. Simon en bon Souvenir” (on the horizontal bar of the window frame). At some point, another artist painted a frizzy red hairstyle (probably considered more up-to-date) on Kathleen Newton.

Room Overlooking the Harbour (c. 1878-79), by James Tissot. Oil on panel 25 by 33 cm, 10 by 13 in. Private collection. (Wikiart.org)

In Room Overlooking the Harbour (c. 1878-79), Tissot depicts Kathleen Newton going about her business while an older man (who could be a servant accompanying the couple) gamely models as well.

The picture has been held by the same family since 1933. In excellent condition, though needing to be cleaned and revarnished, it was sold at Sotheby’s, London on July 11 2019, for £ 400,000 (Hammer price).

Richmond

By the Thames at Richmond (1878-79), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 29.2 x 19.7 cm. Private collection. (Wikimedia)

In 1878-79, the couple traveled west to Richmond, a village on the south bank of the Thames, where Tissot painted By the Thames at Richmond (oil on canvas) and Richmond Bridge (oil on panel, 35.6 x 22.9 cm).

Exterior view of Baker Street Metropolitan Railway station, 27 December, 1862, The Illustrated London News. [Wikipedia; this work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1924.]

Richmond Bridge from the west (Wikipedia)

Richmond Bridge, built of Portland stone between 1774 and 1777, began as a toll bridge, but tolls ended in 1859. Its five segmental arches, rise gradually to the tall, 60-foot wide central span which allowed vessels to pass through the tallest arch.

In Richmond Bridge, Kathleen Newton wears the green tartan gown from Room Overlooking the Harbour and The Warrior’s Daughter (The Convalescent, c. 1878, Manchester Art Gallery, U.K.).

In By the Thames at Richmond, she wears the striking, simple brown floral dress also worn in three oil versions (and one watercolor version) of La sœur aînée (The Elder Sister, c. 1881) and in The Garden Bench (c. 1882, private collection). The little girl is in the exact same pose and outfit as in the photograph above, painted in the third version of Waiting for the Ferry. The man uses his cane to trace “I love you” in the ground beneath the woman’s gaze.

Kathleen Newton, who died of tuberculosis in 1882, was depicted in a chaise-longue looking ill by Tissot in The Dreamer (Summer Evening, Musée d’Orsay ), c. 1876. While the secluded couple’s trips outside the city in 1878-79 must have been liberating escapes made possible by new forms of transportation, they also may have been just what the doctor ordered.

The Victorian Web is a vast resource on literature, history and culture in the age of Victoria.

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

References

Baedeker, Karl. London and its environs, including excursions to Brighton, the Isle of Wight, etc.: handbook for travelers. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1878.

Collins’ Illustrated Guide to London and Neighbourhood. London: William Collins, Sons, and Company, 1875.

Matyjaszkiewicz, Krystyna, ed. James Tissot. New York: Abbeville Press, 1985; Barbican Art Gallery, c. 1984.

Measom, George S. Official illustrated guide to the South-Eastern railway, and its branches. London: Reed and Pardon, c. 1860.

Misfeldt, Willard. “James Jacques Joseph Tissot: A Bio-Critical Study.” Ph.D. diss., Washington University. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms International, 1971.

Misfeldt, Willard E. J.J. Tissot: Prints from the Gotlieb Collection. Alexandria, Virginia: Art Services International, 1991.

Paquette, Lucy. “Artistic intimates:  Tissot’s patrons among his friends & colleagues.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/artistic-intimates-tissots-patrons-among-his-friends-colleagues/. Web. 8 July 2019.

Paquette, Lucy. “The Artist’s Closet: James Tissot’s Prop Costumes.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2017/03/16/the-artists-closet-james-tissots-prop-costumes/. Web. 8 July 2019.

Paquette, Lucy. “The Art of Waiting, by James Tissot.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/the-art-of-waiting-by-james-tissot/. Web. 8 July 2019.

Sotheby’s. “Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite and British Impressionist Art, 11 July 2019.” Lot 36, Condition Report. https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2019/victorian-pre-raphaelite-and-british-impressionist-art/james-jacques-joseph-tissot-room-overlooking-the. 11 July 2019.

Thorne James. Handbook to the Environs of London, Part I. London: John Murray, 1876.

Wentworth, Michael. James Tissot. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Wood, Christopher. Tissot: The Life and Work of Jacques Joseph Tissot, 1836-1902. London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., 1986.

Related posts:

The Art of Waiting, by James Tissot

Victorians on the Move, by James Tissot

Tissot and Degas visit the Louvre, 1879

James Tissot Domesticated

© 2019 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

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

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

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

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “Tissot’s Study for ‘Young Lady in a Boat.'” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2019/08/15/tissots-study-for-young-lady-in-a-boat/. <Date viewed.>

James Tissot’s Study for Young Lady in a Boat (Jeune femme en bateau, 1870), called Pensive Girl Adrift in a Boat, illustrates how quickly and confidently he prepared for his oil paintings. By this time a successful painter with a villa and studio in the avenue de l’Impératrice (now avenue Foch) in Paris, this study appears dashed off in minutes by a professional assured of wealthy and aristocratic patrons. Young Lady in a Boat, now in a private collection, 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 later that year.

In the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. but not on view, this study is half the size of the final oil painting. Tissot used red chalk to loosely sketch the contour of the low boat. The central figure is delineated in such precise strokes that it is clear he knew exactly how he wanted to portray the young and beautiful woman: seated, wearing a long-sleeved white muslin prop gown with distinctive cuffs, which he had featured in Unaccepted (1869, private collection) as well as other versions of Young Lady in a Boat, including some entitled On the River. The black straw hat, with its profusion of black and white striped ribbon bows, also is repeated in this composition.

Pensive Girl Adrift in a Boat, by James Tissot. Red chalk on buff wove paper, 25.3 by 34.3 cm (9 15/16 by 13 1/2 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

And there is a pug dog – not nestled on the woman’s lap or at her feet, but oddly positioned behind her, on guard at the boat’s stern. As Tissot deftly sketched out options for the shape of the boat and the silhouette of the woman, the study indicates he was certain where he wanted the pug.

Queen Victoria began breeding pugs in the 1860s, and Tissot, well aware of trends in England, included pugs in a number of paintings at this time: La Cheminée (By the Fireside, c. 1869), Unaccepted (1869), Jeune femme en bateau (Young Woman in a Boat, 1870), La partie carrée (The Foursome, 1870), and Vive la République! (Un souper sous le Directoire, c. 1870).

Tissot’s study also indicates his certainty about the background for a picture clearly painted in his studio rather than en plein air: to the woman’s right, the long vertical strokes were realized in the resulting oil as reeds, while the faint horizontal lines behind her indicated the shoreline that echoes the horizontal line of the port side of the boat.

He also knew he wanted the viewer’s eye to travel from the bouquet of flowers in front of the woman diagonally back into the picture space, to her face and on to the pug, and each iteration of his study indicates this composition. In the finished work, the woman, with her skirts and draped shawl, sits higher on the boat than in the studies, and her bouquet is smaller.

With few adjustments, and no apparent redrawn elements or erasures, Tissot rapidly laid out the scene.

Even the woman’s pose was worked out in his mind prior to this study. Her right arm is bent on her lap, with her hand on her chin; her left arm is folded beneath, dangling a fan over her right thigh. But while the inset at the lower right of the study indicates only the placement of the fan, the larger central study indicates the hand would lay over the handle of the fan. In the final composition, Tissot shows the woman, rather coquettishly, barely supporting the fan between her upturned palm; she might be swinging or tapping it. The effect suggests both languor and movement.

Another decision the study helped Tissot make was the shape of the boat. In the large central portion of the study, and in the inset at the lower right, he initially envisioned a skiff with relatively straight sides and a wide, square stern. But in the inset at the lower left, he experimented with curved sides and a narrow stern that draws the viewer’s eye to the pug dog, and this is the shape he used in the oil painting.

Perhaps the most fascinating decision James Tissot made with this study, and the choice that is so characteristic of the enduring charm of his work, is to pivot the woman’s gaze from the right to a frank contemplation of the viewer. She is, in fact, studying us.

As for her guardian pug, a critic at the time remarked that it was “a dog with the head of a monkey…who appears without doubt to be a very rare species.”

Young Lady in a Boat (Jeune femme en bateau), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 50.2 by 64.8 cm. Private collection. (Wikimedia)

Related posts:

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

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

Girls to Float Your Boat, by James Tissot

James Tissot’s Animals

© 2019 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

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

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

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

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “Tissot’s Textures.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2019/09/12/tissots-textures/. <Date viewed.>

James Tissot’s oil paintings emanate the luxury of Second Empire France and Victorian life, in part by his subject matter and perhaps even more by his skill in realistically depicting texture. Considered superficial by some for his ability to render fabrics in great detail, Tissot was masterful in his ability to recreate on canvas the tactile experience of materials ranging from silk to stone. Often, it’s Tissot’s characteristic juxtaposition of a variety of contrasting textures that produces the sense of opulence in his pictures.

Here are several paintings in which Tissot brilliantly brought surfaces to sumptuous life.

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

In The Snack, Tissot created multiple layers of textures. The subject, a woman richly dressed in a layered ensemble featuring a crisp, knife-pleated underskirt and edging of soft fur, stands in the middle ground of the picture space. The background comprises tapestries and velvety draperies and, even farther back in the space, the airy, lush greenery in the conservatory. On the satiny wood floor stands a hefty carved wooden table whose polished top holds a crystal wine decanter topped by a shimmering silver repoussé lid, and a Chinese porcelain vase carried upward by a feathery dried floral arrangement. A heavy cloth napkin, cleverly seeming within our grasp, accents the hard surfaces.

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 is a riot of contrasting textures: in the background there are the fluted cast-iron columns of Tissot’s garden colonnade, the weathered stone tree pots and pond rim, and the gnarled, weighty tree trunk, interspersed with the lacy branches of the willows and hickory trees which flutter over the glassy water. In the foreground, softly draped gowns, warm shawls, and yielding cushions play over the intricate wicker chairs and the undulating carpet. The tea-table provides a vignette of contrasting textures of porcelain, silver, and cake; in fact, each section of the painting is a celebration of varied materials we long to touch.

Waiting for the Train (Willesden Junction), c. 1871-1873, by James Tissot. Oil on panel. Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand (Image: the-athenaeum.org).

In Waiting for the Train (Willesden Junction), the worn leather baggage greets us; we can almost run our fingers over its comfortable smoothness. Behind it stands the painting’s subject, a woman sporting an array of textures, from her heavy gown to her wool traveling blanket, leather bag, profuse bouquet of flowers, well-thumbed book, metal-tipped umbrella, and straw boater. The softer textures are juxtaposed against the hard tiled platform with its jagged-edged roof line, the metal of the rubbish bin, and the glass lantern, all against the background of the iron train tracks, the iron, glass and steel of the station, and in the distance, two train engines. These solid surfaces are softened by the forms of the passengers to the right and left of the central figure as well as, in the far background, the billowing forms of the trees and the great puffs of steam from the engines.

A Widow (Une veuve, 1868), by James Tissot.  Oil on canvas, 27 by 19.5 in. (68.5 by 49.5 cm). (Photo:  Wikimedia.org)

In A Widow, Tissot presents a seemingly decorous subject amid a jumble of textures that beckon us to step onto the sandy ground of the scene. The black shape of the central figure’s full-skirted gown is mitigated by its sheer, silk chiffon outer layer. While the tea-table would be more predictably placed at the woman’s left, the soft and rounded mass of flowers on the open-shelved table at her side further lightens the black gown. Since the narrative component of the picture takes place in the foreground, and the hazy background comprises a great deal of the image, Tissot has defined and enlivened the middle ground with a detailed still-life on the tea-table. Crystal wine decanters and glasses, a glossy Chinese porcelain biscuit jar, and a plate of tempting pastries contrast with the soft forms throughout the painting.

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: Wikipaintings.org)

At the Rifle Range shows Tissot at his finest: the woman, sporting a fur-trimmed, patterned jacket and overskirt, is juxtaposed against luxuriant, rippling shrubbery and an imposing brick garden wall with its wide pillars. The grass below is fine and soft, the metal gun barrels substantial. The wooden table, posts and trellis provide a transition between the hard and soft surfaces. The palpable sense of luxury and privilege in this image is largely due to the woman’s lavish costume, and Tissot makes her a gem by placing her in this richly textured setting.

Les Adieux (The Farewells) 1871, by James Tissot, oil on canvas, 39 1/2 by 24 5/8 in. (100.3 by 62.6 cm), Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, U.K. Photo courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, by Lucy Paquette © 2012

In Les Adieux, Tissot showcases his expertise painting stone, brick, vegetation, fabric, metal and even the delicate lace mitts of the woman and supple leather gloves of the man. The iron fence, the ivy climbing up the brick wall, the rough, stained stone, and the dead, dry leaves at the woman’s feet are exceptionally convincing in their tangible three-dimensionality.

Still Life with Shells (1866), by James Tissot. Private collection.

As we head into autumn and gather the favorite materials, books, and mementos we take comfort in, we can feel Tissot’s evident delight in rendering tactile forms and textures on a two-dimensional canvas, as captured in his Still Life with Shells. It is not superficial, but deeply human to be alive to the beauty of the world around us and the luxury inherent in our sensory experience.

Related posts:

James Tissot’s Brushwork

Tissot’s Tiger Skin: A Prominent Prop

Wicker: James Tissot’s Modern Prop Furniture

A Proper British Prop: Tissot’s Tartan Blanket

James Tissot, the painter art critics love to hate

©  2019 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library

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

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “James Tissot’s Prints.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2019/10/15/james-tissots-prints/. <Date viewed.>

In 1860 and 1861, James Tissot experimented with etching, making a half-dozen plates as he participated in the etching revival in France, which began in the mid-nineteenth century with artists of the Barbizon School. Tissot’s early prints were based on subjects unrelated to his oil paintings, such as Portrait of a Woman (1860).

Portrait of a Woman (1860), by James Tissot. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

In 1865, two steel engravings after Tissot’s illustrations were included on the frontispiece and title page of Tom Taylor’s English translation of La Villemarque’s Barzaz-Breiz, Chants populaires de la Bretagne, which also featured several wood engravings in the text after J.E. Millais and others. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was so impressed by Tissot’s contributions that he requested a proof of each from the publisher.

Six years later, in 1871, Tissot’s drawings of figures from the Franco-Prussian War provided the basis for several wood engravings to illustrate his friend Thomas Gibson Bowles’ book, The Defence of Paris, Narrated As It Was Seen. Tissot emigrated to London after the Paris Commune that spring, and the following year, one of the paintings he exhibited at the Royal Academy, Les Adieux, was such a success that a steel engraving after the picture was subsequently published in London. In 1874, Tissot’s (How We Read the) News of our Marriage also was reproduced commercially as a steel engraving. Both of these engravings were displayed at the International Exhibition in London in 1874. The popularity of these prints and the lucrative market for reproductions of popular Academy pictures led Tissot to realize the financial potential in producing his own reproductive engravings.

Second Frontispiece (Sitting on the Globe)/Deuxième frontispice (Assise sur le globe), 1875, by James Tissot. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Tissot published Ten Etchings himself from his home studio in Grove End Road – without a dealer, an uncommon practice for artists at the time. He rapidly perfected his technique. Quarrelling is the first of Tissot’s paintings known to be reproduced by him; Lovers’ Quarrel, the etching after the painting, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1876, along with an etching of The Thames.

The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (1876), by James Tissot. Drypoint on off-white wove paper. Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.

In 1876 and 1877, Tissot exhibited his prints in “L’exposition des ouvrages exécuté en noir et blanc,” Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris and “Exhibition of Works in Black and White,” Dudley Gallery, London. In 1878 and 1879, he exhibited his etchings alongside his oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery in London, among other venues.

Although Tissot kept a printing press in his studio, where he supervised the making of his prints (and retained the reproduction rights), he used a professional printer for larger editions.

At the Seashore (1880), by James Tissot. Etching and drypoint. Cleveland Museum of Art.

In 1880, Tissot became a charter member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, founded by Seymour Haden for artists who produced their own prints of their paintings, and he began exhibiting his prints regularly in England and Scotland through the end of the decade, contributing works to shows including “Manchester Exhibition of Works in Black and White,” “Exhibition of Works in Black and White, Glasgow,” and an exhibition with the Society of Painter-Etchers in London in 1881.

A Children’s Garden Party (1880), by James Tissot. Drypoint on paper. The Clark, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Tissot’s etchings account for a significant and increasing proportion of his earnings between 1876 and 1881. His subjects were often based on his domestic arrangement with his young mistress, Kathleen Newton, who moved into his house in St. John’s Wood around 1876 and appeared in about two dozen of his prints, and her two children.

In May, 1882, he held a one-man exhibition at the Dudley Gallery, London, “J.J. Tissot” An Exhibition of Modern Art,” which included twelve oil paintings and twenty-one cloisonné enamels as well as fifty-eight etchings.

Summer Evening (Soirée d’été, 1882), by James Tissot. Etching and drypoint. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

After Kathleen Newton died in November 1882 and Tissot moved to Paris, he took a number of the plates he had made in London and used them to make a substantial number of copies throughout that decade, offering them for sale during his exhibition of prints in Paris in 1886. The Paris editions were printed on heavier paper (often cream-colored) in brown-black ink, and though often stamped, they are rarely signed in pencil. Tissot carefully numbered these prints and the editions were smaller.

He also produced new plates in Paris, including five etchings made after oil paintings in his series La Femme à Paris.

La Femme à Paris: L’Ambitieuse (1883-85), by James Tissot. Etching and drypoint. Yale University Art Gallery.

Occasionally, particularly when living in London, Tissot experimented with antique, Japanese, and colored papers, as well as vellum, and he sometimes used colored inks.

Emigrants (1880), by James Tissot. Drypoint on laid paper. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

When Tissot signed a print in pencil (never in ink), it indicated he considered it outstanding; pencil-signed copies of most of his prints are rare. Almost all copies of four of Tissot’s prints are signed and seem to have been issued in relatively small editions: Mavourneen (1877), October (1878), Emigrants (1880), and In the Sunlight (1881). He had begun using the red monogram stamp on his first prints in 1860 and continued to use it on those he considered superior – though not consistently.

Le Matin (Morning, 1886), by James Tissot. Mezzotint on wove paper. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

According to Tissot scholar Dr. Willard E. Misfeldt, there is no reliable guide to the number of Tissot’s prints that were made. However, William Weston, when exhibiting Tissot prints at his London gallery in 1984, observed in the accompanying catalogue that there were two editions of some of Tissot’s prints – a London printing and a Paris printing. Prints made in London, generally by Frederick Goulding (1842–1909, described by Haden in 1879 as “the best printer of etchings in England just now”), were done in small editions, usually on white, thin laid papers in black or brown-black ink, and often were stamped and signed in pencil by Tissot. These high-quality impressions of Tissot’s finest and most popular prints are scarce today.

Another professional printer whom Tissot entrusted with his work was Auguste Delâtre (1822-1907), of whom Haden said, “if Rembrandt lived now, he would send his plates to Delâtre.”

A Winter’s Walk (1880), by James Tissot. Etching and drypoint printed in black and red. Minneapolis Institute of Art.

In all, Tissot made about ninety plates between 1860 and 1885. His major prints from the end of this period are the five etchings made after paintings from his series La Femme à Paris. He ceased making prints after 1885, and the following year issued a small promotional catalogue of his prints in Paris. Yet sales of Tissot’s prints declined steeply after this date, and while he seems to have stopped advertising them, he contributed to exhibitions including “Exposition de gravures du siècle,” Galerie Georges Petit (1887), and “Exposition de Peintres-Graveurs at Galerie Durand-Ruel (1889), both in Paris.

According to research by Dr. Misfeldt, Tissot’s carnet, or account book, shows that he earned an increasing amount of his annual income through sales of his prints. In 1876, 2.56% of his income was from prints, a figure that peaked at 74% in 1884, (then dropped sharply until it reached 71% in 1889 and suddenly became negligible).

Mavourneen, featuring Kathleen Newton, was the most popular of his prints.

Over 5,000 unsold impressions of his prints were found in James Tissot’s studio after his death in 1902. Sold at his estate auction in 1903, many of these prints were available at a Paris gallery for years afterward.

Tissot’s prints now sell in the general range of $1,000-10,000 USD, depending on quality, subject matter, and scarcity. In 2013, a particularly fine etching and drypoint print of Tissot’s Octobre (1878), from the edition of approximately one hundred and signed and stamped by the artist, was sold for $ 28,000 USD (Hammer) at auction in New York.

Note: I am neither an art dealer nor an appraiser, and can offer no valuation of fine art prints.

References

“Fourteen Etchings by J.J. Tissot,” by Michael Wentworth, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Summer, 1968).

James Tissot: Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints, by Michael J. Wentworth. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1978.

J.J. Tissot: Prints from the Gotlieb Collection, by Willard E. Misfeldt. Alexandria, Virginia: Art Services International, 1991.

©  2019 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library

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

See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYV.

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “James Tissot’s Prints at the Zimmerli Art Museum.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/james-tissots-prints-at-the-zimmerli-art-museum/. <Date viewed.>

Although they are seldom on display, James Tissot’s prints are included in numerous public and university art collections worldwide.

Through March 29, 2020, and concurrent with the Tissot retrospective on the West Coast of the U.S., admirers of the artist’s work on the East Coast have the perfect opportunity to appreciate a group of Tissot’s etchings, drypoints and mezzotints at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

The collection of Tissot’s prints at the Zimmerli, a teaching museum founded in 1966, was established with five works in 1972 and has doubled with the recent acquisition of the Prodigal Son series and Ces dames des chars, from the series La Femme à Paris (The Parisian Woman), all on view for the first time.

Intimate Details: Prints by James Tissot, organized by Dr. Christine Giviskos, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and European Art, showcases Tissot’s mastery of the medium in a focused and admirably straightforward display that informs, then lets his work speak for itself.

The exhibition brochure, a substantial resource document for visitors available in the gallery, provides the history of Tissot’s etchings and explains the techniques he used for his prints, almost all of which reproduced his painted compositions. Concise wall labels offer just enough specific context to each print; the real experience for visitors is the visual feast of the Zimmerli’s holdings of prints by this extraordinarily talented, versatile and productive artist, and the secluded, brightly-lit Volpe Gallery is ideal for close study and contemplation.

Matinée de printemps (Spring Morning), 1875, by James Tissot. Drypoint. Zimmerli Art Museum.

The oldest print in the collection, and one of the first to be acquired is Matinée de printemps (Spring Morning), 1875, after the oil painting of the same name now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Though the print is a less detailed version of the painting (and in reverse), Tissot’s artistry with the drypoint needle is evident in his rendering of the pattern of stripes undulating throughout the folds of the woman’s gown, and the highlights and shadows with its drapery. The wall label notes that when this print was exhibited in Paris in 1876, a colleague of Tissot’s assured him of its “great success” there.

Another print acquired by the Zimmerli in 1972, Entre les deux mon coeur balance (How Happy I Could be with Either), 1877, is lushly detailed, almost photographic in its complexity. The exquisitely living, breathing figures in the foreground are juxtaposed against the dark drama of the hulking ship in the background. Tissot had so mastered the medium by this time that not only pattern, but surface textures are visible. To this, Tissot brought sensory experience such as the feeling of the warmth of the women’s lap blankets and the movement of the water. This is no mere reproduction of Portsmouth Dockyard (c. 1877, Tate) the oil painting exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, but a mesmerizing image that demonstrates how Tissot’s etchings were each works of art in themselves.

L’enfant prodigue: frontispice (Frontispiece for The Prodigal Son), 1881, by James Tissot. Etching. Zimmerli Art Museum.

The Frontispiece, a deft trompe l’oeil book whose open pages display the Scripture verses of the Parable of the Prodigal Son that Tissot illustrates in four scenes, reads, “Invented, Painted & Etched by J.J. Tissot, 1881. 17, Grove End Rd. St. John’s Wood, LONDON,” in the lower right corner. These etchings are based on The Prodigal Son series of four oil paintings (Museé d’Arts de Nantes, France).

L’enfant prodigue: Le départ (The Prodigal Son: The Departure), 1881, by James Tissot. Etching. Zimmerli Art Museum.

In L’enfant prodigue: Le départ (The Departure), Tissot skillfully conveys the effect of lighting diffused through the fabric window shades to set the mood and enliven the room’s architectural details and furnishings.

In the next etching in the series, L’enfant prodigue: en pays étranger (In Foreign Climes), Tissot demonstrates a virtuoso’s understanding of light, shade, pattern and perspective in the fastidious definition of the straw floor mat and the up-lighting on the faces and below the lanterns.

The series is completed with Le retour (The Return) and Le veau gras (The Fatted Calf).

Ces dames des chars (The Chariot Women), 1885, by James Tissot. Etching and drypoint. Zimmerli Art Museum.

The Ladies of the Chariots (c. 1883-85), by James Tissot. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. (Photo: Lucy Paquette, 2013).

In the Zimmerli’s most recently-acquired etching, a proof or trial impression of Ces dames des chars (The Chariot Women, a subject from his fifteen-painting series, La Femme à Paris, or Women of Paris), Tissot also uses drypoint to produced sharply focused elements including the sense of strong illumination from the electric sconces at the Paris Hippodrome, the play of light over the glittering armor of the women’s costumes, and even the architecture and the audience members. In the area below the print plate, his experimentation with the spacing and density of etched lines show his meticulous attention to the effects of light and color gradation he could create as he translated a colorful painted composition into a monochromatic image. Tissot’s precision is so delightful that a magnifying glass like the one mounted on a wall in the nearby photography gallery would be a welcome addition to the display.

Le banc de jardin (The Garden Bench), 1883, by James Tissot. Mezzotint. Zimmerli Art Museum.

The year after the death of his young mistress and muse, Tissot reproduced his oil painting, Le banc de jardin (The Garden Bench, 1883, private collection), as a mezzotint – created with a velvety texture suiting the nostalgic scene of Kathleen Newton, her two children from previous relationships, and a niece. This creates an image in which details throughout are not as sharp, but the fur, hair, faces, costumes, and even the bow atop Mrs. Newton’s bonnet are soft and warm against a generalized background of the garden at his home in St. John’s Wood, London.

It is so rare that James Tissot’s prints are the sole basis of an exhibition that, other than the 2017 exhibition, Tissot Prints, at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, the last was possibly held in 1978 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, when its publication of Michael Wentworth’s James Tissot: Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints was accompanied by an exhibition of the same name.

In his lifetime, Tissot’s prints were extremely popular in London and Paris, and they remain desirable to today’s collectors. Amid what Dr. Giviskos terms “the vagaries of Tissot’s reputation,” the technical brilliance of his etchings has been overlooked – and she suggests it may not be long before James Tissot is recognized as one of the master print makers of the nineteenth century.

The Zimmerli has particularly strong print holdings in nineteenth-century French art and American art.

For those who miss this exhibition, the Study Room is open by appointment, offering the opportunity to examine prints as well as drawings, photographs, rare books and archives.

Special thanks to

Theresa C. Watson, Communications Coordinator

and

Christine Giviskos, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and European Art

Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University

Related posts:

James Tissot’s Prints

© 2019 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library

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

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “James Tissot: Fashion & Faith, a retrospective at the Legion of Honor.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2019/12/16/james-tissot-fashion-faith-a-retrospective-at-the-legion-of-honor/.

James Tissot hasn’t always been in fashion, but he always had faith in his vision and in his legacy.

Opening this major retrospective exhibition of his work with a showstopper – October (1877), a monumental oil painting of the love of his life, the vibrant young Kathleen Newton teasingly skipping ahead of us, looking over her shoulder at us as if to invite us in – was an inspired decision by curator Melissa E. Buron, director of the art division at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor art museum, where James Tissot: Fashion and Faith is on view through February 9, 2020.

Installation view of James Tissot: Fashion & Faith at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, October 2019 Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

James Tissot, “Self Portrait,” ca. 1865. Oil on panel, 19 5/8 x 11 7/8 in. (49.8 x 30.2 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Mildred Anna Williams Collection, 1961.16 Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

By 1870, at age 34, James Tissot (1836–1902) was a financially successful painter with an opulent new Parisian villa and studio near the Arc de Triomphe. Handsome and charming, his friends included the painters James McNeill Whistler, Edgar Degas, and Édouard Manet. When the Prussians attacked Paris that year, Tissot became a sharpshooter defending the besieged capital. After the Commune, a bloody civil uprising in the spring of 1871, he moved to London for a decade and rebuilt his career, found and lost love, and returned to Paris in 1882 to find himself out of step with his peers who had founded and fostered the movement that became known as Impressionism. He began again, this time achieving international fame.

In the same way that the Vanderbilts’ Gilded Age Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina is the perfect setting for the current Downton Abbey exhibition, San Francisco’s elegant Legion of Honor Museum is the perfect setting for this James Tissot retrospective, the first major international exhibition on Tissot in twenty years, and the first ever on the West Coast of the United States. A smaller replica of the imposing neoclassical Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, with its colonnaded courtyard, was completed in 1924, built on a bluff overlooking the Golden Gate. While Downton-esque escapism may not be everyone’s cup of tea, an open mind may discover a cerebral, enigmatic artist with a heart-rending personal story.

Co-organized by the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, Paris, the exhibition includes approximately 70 paintings from public and private collections in addition to drawings, prints, photographs, and cloisonné enamels, in an effort to provide a new perspective on James Tissot for visitors who are familiar with him – and, certainly, to provide an introduction for those who are not. Arranged “chrono-thematically,” the show’s galleries move us back and forth in time a bit to organize the work of a career that began in Paris in the 1850s, relocated to London from 1871 to 1882, and moved back to Paris, each era featuring its own subjects and styles.

The first gallery introduces us to Tissot’s work with his remarkably modern Self-Portrait (c. 1865), from the Legion of Honor’s collection. From there, it’s a visual feast of some of Tissot’s most gorgeous images, painted when he was at the height of his success in Paris prior to 1870 and then in London during the 1870s. These are smallish oil paintings, suited for collectors’ walls, some of which reflect the contemporary craze for Asian art: Young Women Looking at the Chinese Temple (1869), The Japanese Scroll (1872-1873), and The Fan (1875). The Partie Carrée (1870), painted in Paris before Tissot emigrated to England, shows his sexy side, while in a later gallery, Too Early (1873), exhibited at the Royal Academy, indicates his subsequent need to conform to the more prim tastes of the London market while also showcasing his flair for modern subjects and his unique wit. Surprises abound in this exhibition, and one in this gallery is Two Figures at the Door (The Proposal), (1872), previously unknown to contemporary scholars and displayed in public for the first time.

James Tissot (1836-1902). “le départ de l’enfant prodigue”. Huile sur toile. 1863. Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais. Image provided courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The next gallery features canvases from Tissot’s early years, when he painted “medieval” subject matter. These often were scenes from Goethe’s 1808 version of the legend of Faust, who sells his soul to Mephistopheles, the devil, in return for youth, knowledge and magical powers; Faust meets and seduces the beautiful and innocent Marguerite, who comes to an unhappy end. On another wall are images Tissot created during the Franco-Prussian War, when he defended Paris as a sharpshooter. The Wounded Soldier (c. 1870), a watercolor purchased by the Tate in 2016, is a singularly beautiful image of a restless young man in uniform perched on the arm of a sofa and quite possibly Tissot’s most sensitive, profound, and arresting work. He kept it in his studio all his life, never exhibiting it.

Installation view of James Tissot: Fashion & Faith at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, October 2019 Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

A capacious semi-circular gallery provides a dramatic display area for some of the fifteen large-scale oil paintings comprising Tissot’s La Femme à Paris series (Women of Paris, c. 1883-1885): The Shop Girl, Provincial Woman, The Bridesmaid, The Artists’ Wives, and The Ladies of the Chariots, an extravaganza of glittering circus performers on horseback under the electric lights of the Hippodrome de l’Alma, built in 1877 to accommodate up to eight thousand spectators. To the side is a smaller canvas, a study for a painting in the series called “The Sphinx” (Woman in an Interior), depicts the well-connected and artistic Louise Riesener, to whom Tissot was briefly engaged before she decided that he was too old for her.

Installation view of James Tissot: Fashion & Faith at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, October 2019 Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

A gallery devoted to Tissot’s portraits overwhelms with stunning images of individuals who leap off the canvas like characters from a budget-busting Masterpiece Theatre drama chronicling the Second Empire and Victorian high life – the very modern and direct Mlle L.L. (1864), the cozy group of the Marquis and Marquise de Miramon and their children (1865), the Marquise de Miramon (1866) in her boudoir, wearing a luscious pink velvet peignoir, the pensive man of business Aimé Seillière (1866) with his coat over his arm as he heads out the door, and a highlight, Miramon lounging with eleven impeccably-tailored members of the exclusive Circle of the rue Royale (1868). There are outsized personalities, including the debonair and long-legged Captain Frederick Burnaby, the debt-ridden cad who was briefly Tissot’s art dealer, Algernon Moses Marsden, and, of course, the glowing, beloved and doomed Kathleen Newton.

Installation view of James Tissot: Fashion & Faith at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, October 2019 Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

In another gallery, some of Tissot’s most iconic London pictures are displayed: The Captain’s Daughter (1873), The Ball on Shipboard (c. 1874), London Visitors (1873-1874), The Letter (1874), The Thames (1875), Holyday (1876), Chrysanthemums (c. 1876), The Gallery of HMS “Calcutta” (Portsmouth) (c. 1876), Croquet (1877-1878), and Evening (also known as The Ball, 1878). Afternoon Tea (also known as In the Conservatory, 1874), is on display for the first time since 1955.

James Tissot, “Hide and Seek,” ca. 1877. Oil on panel, 30 x 23.75 in. (73.4 x 53.9 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Chester Dale Fund 1978.47.1 Image provided courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The exhibition segues into joyful images of the domestic idyll at Tissot’s villa in St. John’s Wood, London, where the divorced Mrs. Newton’s children and nieces are shown scampering inside and out in paintings such as Hide and Seek (c. 1877), Kathleen Newton at the Piano (c. 1880-1881), The Little Nimrod, c. 1882-1883. These merry, well-dressed children at play, with a loving mother, present a vision of a harmonious family life as appealing to us as it was to the Victorians. These scenes are followed on a more subdued note by sad images of Kathleen Newton in declining health.

James Tissot (French, 1836-1902). What Our Lord Saw from the Cross, 1886-1894. Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray-green wove paper, 9 3/4 x 9 1/16 in. (24.8 x 23 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchased by public subscription, Image provided courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

James Tissot, who moved from the coastal Nantes to the capital city of Paris to study art and soon became immensely affluent and prominent, strove, failed, succeeded, fought, suffered – along the way inspiring envy and spite – and then repeated the cycle in London. He made friends easily but lost some, notably Degas, as well. Tissot was not venerated, even though he, at the end, aimed to be, because he expected to be remembered as the visionary illustrator of the Bible, which brought him unprecedented wealth and acclaim in the decades before his death. Never-before-published photographs of Tissot provide us a look into his private life, in his later years, at his secluded château in eastern France with family and friends.

James Tissot, French, 1836–1902 “Holyday” (The Picnic) , ca. 1876. Oil on canvas Image: 30 x 39 in. (76.2 x 99.4 cm) Frame: x in. (92.5 x 118.5 cm) Tate Image provided courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

In spite of the paintings of Mrs. Newton’s drawn-out death from tuberculosis, a scourge of the time that even Tissot could not disregard, and even including his praiseworthy images of soldiers during Franco-Prussian War, there is something optimistic about his oeuvre, with none of Degas’ misogyny or Manet’s demoralized barmaids or drunks. Tissot proved he could skewer those in power, as in his caricature of Napoléon III for Vanity Fair in 1869 – a year before he sent France into an unwinnable war with Prussia. In Tissot’s portraits and his paintings of domestic bliss with Kathleen Newton, he portrayed people in their best light, while many of his pictures are notable for their psychological ambiguity or tension – moodiness, quarrels, shady situations, vulgarity, frustration, even anger – with a soupçon of urbane naughtiness and wit all his own. Ms. Buron observes that Tissot was generous to viewers of his oil paintings, providing exquisite details for them to enjoy.

James Tissot’s particular brand of truth, beauty, and humor was recognized by Vincent van Gogh, in an 1880 letter to his brother, Theo: “There is something of the human soul in his work and that is why he is great, immense, infinite…”

James Tissot, French, 1836–1902 “L’Apparition Médiunimique” (The Apparition), 1885 Mezzotint 25.375 x 19.375 in. (64.45 x 49.21 cm) Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco 2001.26 Image provided courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The exhibition reaches its denouement in a small, final gallery highlighting the recently rediscovered oil painting, The Apparition (1885), showing the spirit of Kathleen Newton as Tissot experienced it during a séance. A wall of the gallery is lined with a selection of Tissot’s watercolor illustrations for The Life of Christ, their blend of mysticism and spiritualism the subject Ms. Buron has chosen for her Ph.D. thesis. In a corner vitrine is a more material contribution she has made to this retrospective: her own copy of the illustrated “Tissot Bible,” a gift from her husband.

The show is, beyond an important retrospective of a lesser-known artist’s work, a gift to us from a curator captivated and challenged by an intriguing individual so confident in his own talent that he declined Degas’ exhortation to exhibit with the Impressionists. This decision, along with his move to London, put James Tissot in the position of being neither fully a French painter nor a British one, and his reputation has suffered.

Yet as this exhibition so sumptuously demonstrates, Tissot’s legacy in our age is that faith and beauty will always be in fashion.

James Tissot: Fashion and Faith is co-organized by Paul Perrin and Marine Kisiel, Curators of Paintings at the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, Paris, where the exhibition will be on view from March 23 through July 19, 2020, and Cyrille Sciama, Director of Musée des impressionnismes Giverny.

Related posts:

James Tissot’s Prints at the Zimmerli Art Museum

© 2019 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library

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

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “James Tissot, the painter art critics still love to hate: a retrospective review round-up.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/james-tissot-the-painter-art-critics-still-love-to-hate-a-retrospective-review-round-up/. <Date viewed.>

The current James Tissot retrospective, at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco until it travels to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris in March, attempts to reassess the artist’s work in the nineteenth-century canon. As of its opening in November, 2019, a number of reviews have been published, collectively providing some idea of the prevailing view of Tissot and his oeuvre and the critical response to the exhibition’s stated objective.

Self-Portrait (c. 1865), by James Tissot, with “all its mysterious emo glamour.”

Of the dozen reviews I’ve read, some are more announcements of the exhibition, or merely reiterate information from the Legion of Honor’s press kit. In the latter case, it often was clear that some reviewers did not know what to make of Tissot or his work and were playing it safe.

An early reviewer, for Boomers Daily, noted, “Tissot consistently defied convention in both his professional and personal life,” and that certainly is true.

Art and Antiques Magazine’s review began with the critic referring to Tissot’s c. 1865 Self-Portrait, with “all its mysterious emo glamour,” and commenting, “Tissot made a name for himself as a painter of glossy society pictures. But he ended up – as if he got in the wrong cab after a party one night – as a reclusive painter of Spiritualist and Biblical subjects.” She summarized his oeuvre as “ ‘attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places’…Men are smug and women are bored.”

The reviewer for France-Amerique, the only bilingual French-English publication in the U.S., vacillated: “With a foot in two cultures, a style that refuses categorization, and a dramatic late-career shift in subject matter, he is hard to pin down…Tissot’s meticulous renderings of shipboard balls and elegant picnics have a superficial air of frivolity yet convey enduring human truths to the astute viewer. One reviewer observed that he was ‘looked upon over here as a kind of artistic Zola.’ ”

Holyday (c. 1876), by James Tissot. Tate Britain.  (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Apollo Magazine’s critic damned Tissot with faint praise: “the artist comes across as focused, organised, ambitious and immensely hard-working.”

The Wall Street Journal’s critic was muted, leaving the impression she was not a fan but did not wish to be a spoilsport: “But was Tissot more than a fussy society painter? Many critics, then and now, think not.” Comparing him to his peers in England and France, she comments, “Tissot’s art stayed within the lines…[his] subjects seem slight.” She concludes that his paintings “were not necessarily vacuous, as critics have claimed,” adding, “ ‘Faith & Fashion’ surely deepens our understanding of Tissot, and it may convince some visitors that he is underestimated. Still I suspect that for many he may remain just a virtuoso with the brush. And what’s wrong with that?”

Some critics, still, just outright loathe Tissot’s work – and also, strangely, Tissot himself.

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s distinguished art critic, while allowing that the show is “impeccably displayed” and “the historical analysis is first-rate,” reports that “the art itself is often an intellectual letdown.”

He wrote, “One leaves the Legion show with a deep sense of disappointment in an artist who had every advantage – innate skill, early success, inherited wealth and social contacts, a friendship with the Impressionists that saw Edgar Degas inviting him to join one of the most important exhibitions in all art history – but who failed to take the chances and set himself the challenges that might have made him great…With some stunning exceptions, Tissot mostly put that technical skill to producing illustrational bromides.”

While people have their own preferences and affinities, this argument is unsound. In hindsight, the first exhibition of the artists who became known as Impressionists certainly was one of the most important in all art history, but who could have known that at the time, when they were just a loose association of young, frustrated rebels bickering among themselves? Manet thought Renoir, who with Degas was organizing their first independent show, took up painting by mistake and said he would never commit himself with Cezanne, and Degas was not a fan of Monet’s pictures. Tissot did not paint like they did, nor did he have the same perspective or goals; this argument is that he should have known better than to follow his own path. Tissot was proud of his work, and he was true to himself in the way he painted and in the subject matter he chose. Had he merely jumped on the bandwagon and started painting like Renoir and Monet to share in the limelight, he’d have been dismissed by later art historians as derivative. Manet also declined to exhibit with the Impressionists and told Degas, “the Salon is the real field of battle.”

This critic additionally condemns Tissot for the clichéd reason many modern critics have: that Tissot pursued a “lucrative career.” Degas and Manet were on the parental dole into their thirties; Tissot earned his living from the time he moved to Paris at nineteen, drawing portraits of maids and hotel housekeepers for thirty or forty francs a head. All three of them were from wealthy families and received inheritances. Who decreed that an artist is only a genius, or authentic, if they’re above pecuniary considerations? No one wants to be a starving artist. Tissot and Manet both tried to help Degas become more successful before his career began to take off in 1869. In 1868, Manet traveled to London to explore the art market there as “an outlet for our products.” In the early 1870s, Degas repeatedly wrote to Tissot about how to turn a profit from his work; from New Orleans, he wrote, “Here I have acquired the taste for money, and once back I shall know how to earn some I promise you.”

The Ball on Shipboard (c. 1874), by James Tissot. Tate, London. (Photo: the-athenaeum.org)

Then there’s the charge of classism, that in “ ‘The Ball on Shipboard’ (circa 1874) and other works of about the same time…Tissot’s high-fashion figures are of a social class far removed from, for example, the T-shirted revelers in Renoir’s famous ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’ (1881).” This is comical, because critics at the time derided Tissot for portraying, not Society figures, but social climbers in The Ball on Shipboard, one writing, “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 declaring that it featured “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.”

Jesus Ministered to by Angels (Jésus assisté par les anges, 1886-1894), by James Tissot.

The highly credentialed critic for Visual Art Source also detests Tissot, comparing the artist’s “spooky illustrations” of the Bible unfavorably to Michelangelo and Piero della Francesca. Ouch. Who compares favorably to Michelangelo? He observes that the Legion of Honor exhibition is well organized and beautifully presented, but “curiously lacking in [Tissot’s] voice,” and that, “[w]hile a visual delight, it’s not an emotional one.” He adds:

“Tissot’s drawing is sometimes off the mark, with disconnected body parts emerging from the extravagant costumery without evoking the body underneath. The effects sometimes verge on caricature, as in ‘Painters and Their Wives.’ His restrained but knowing satires of the lower orders now look dated and elitist, as in ‘Provincial Woman,’ ‘Too Early,’ and ‘London Visitors.’ The scenarios that he depicts are sometimes lacking in realistic space or lighting, looking as though they were assembled from various parts, without the rhythmic unity and grouping of the Renaissance painters like Carpaccio, an early influence. Check out ‘Departure of the Prodigal Son,’ ‘Return of the Prodigal Son’ and ‘Rue Royale.’ ” This fault with the composition of Tissot’s 1868 portrait of twelve members of the elite private club, the Circle of the rue Royale, has been pointed out many times; the painting is one of the most widely reproduced of Tissot’s images.

Dated and elitist? Too Early (1873), by James Tissot. Guildhall Art Gallery, London. (Photo: Wiki)

While comparing the oranges of James Tissot’s Second Empire and Victorian works to the apples of Renaissance masters, this reviewer does offer some praise for Tissot’s paintings: “Several, such as ‘Safe to Win,’ ‘The Fan,’ ‘Young Women Looking at the Chinese Temple’ and ‘Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon,’ are stunning works of indisputable, irresistible charm and verve,” but he also notes, “Tissot’s more stagy, spiritualized and gauzy images tend toward kitsch.” In the end, he dismisses Tissot’s entire oeuvre as “sensationalist drama, and low-rent entertainment.”

There’s one last sticking point with this critic, however: “The problem for a contemporary #MeToo audience, naturally, lies not in the aesthetic realm but the sociopolitical one. Tissot’s women are delicate, decorative creatures, however gloriously painted…the nineteenth-century status of women has to be considered in the case of Tissot. He was merely one of many artists engaged in the Male Gaze market.” Space does not permit me to address the entire section of this review on this point, but it involves an academic discussion [by Bram Dijkstra in “Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture”] of “bourgeois women of that time, uneducated, confined and cosseted, [who] were projected by their men as the repositories of Christian virtue and innocence…[w]hen they fell short of that…they were misogynistically transformed into the harpies, vampires and succubi of Symbolist art.” Let’s just let Tissot weigh in:

Portrait of Mlle. L.L. (Young Lady in a Red Jacket) (February 1864), by James Tissot.  Museé d’Orsay, Paris.  (Photo: Wikipaintings)

Safe to Win (also known as At the Rifle Range and The Crack Shot, 1869), by James Tissot. Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, U.K. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

The Letter (c. 1878), by James Tissot. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Deep breath.

It may be that you either love Tissot, or you hate him, or he’s just not on your map.

The reviewer from the San Francisco Examiner is a fan (or maybe just a hometown booster?), calling James Tissot: Fashion & Faith “a gift to the Bay Area and not to be missed.”

The Apparition (1885)(mezzotint), by James Tissot

But the brave soul reviewing the retrospective for Hyperallergic put her reputation on the line, openly declaring her feelings: “James Tissot: Fashion & Faith…is a crowd pleaser with…something for everyone…it is wildly likable…What’s more…this is a rare chance to experience the work of an important, but under-known painter.” She wrote, “Tissot was an oddball masquerading as a successful society painter, an artist who’s been shunted aside for not participating in the forward march of capital ‘M’ Modernism.”

While she felt the rediscovered oil painting, The Apparition, is “anemic as a work of art. Too soft and a little vapid,” she termed London Visitors (c. 1874) “weirdly, wonderfully sexy.”

London Visitors (1874), by James Tissot. Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, U.S. (Photo: the-athenaeum.org). “Weirdly, wonderfully sexy.”

So, is the ambitious goal of the current retrospective being realized – is James Tissot’s reputation being reassessed? Despite now being considered “emo” and “weirdly sexy,” a critical reappraisal of Tissot from the art world at large may be too much to hope for. Recently, I saw a Tweet rejecting Tissot’s work as “middlebrow.” Face it, he’s no taped banana.

Perhaps the important outcome of the current retrospective is that James Tissot’s work is being exhibited before a wider public that enjoys his iconic images of nineteenth century life. When I attended the show, I had to navigate crowded galleries, and someone even pushed the curator aside to get closer to that emo portrait. Vive la bourgeoisie.

© 2020 Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

Related Posts:

James Tissot: Fashion & Faith, a retrospective at the Legion of Honor

James Tissot, the painter art critics love to hate

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

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

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

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

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “What happens at the Tissot Symposium…stays at the Tissot Symposium?” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2020/02/13/what-happens-at-the-tissot-symposium-stays-at-the-tissot-symposium/. <Date viewed.>

Melissa Buron and Lucy Paquette

When I visited James Tissot: Fashion and Faith at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco with my husband in November, 2019, curator Melissa E. Buron spent the morning showing us through the galleries.

I’d be lying if I said I sedately strolled through these rooms, each spilling into another, all gleaming with Tissot paintings – of course I darted, mid-sentence, from picture to picture, many of which were on loan from private collections or from institutions I have not yet visited. I recall squealing rather indecorously. We talked nonstop, sharing our thoughts and experiences. Melissa and I have a kindred…well, obsession with Tissot. Over lunch, she asked me to present at the exhibition’s closing symposium, February 8-9, 2020.

Cassandra Sciortino, Melissa Buron and Peter Trippi discussing Tissot during Scholar’s Hours in the Exhibition galleries

It was an honor to be invited to present at this symposium and to meet interesting colleagues working across a wide range of subjects related to Tissot studies.

I made new friends and enjoyed the collegial sharing of information within a larger community of “Tissotistes.”

It was 48 hours of non-stop Tissot immersion, which may sound fairly deranged, but akin to spending a whirlwind weekend at Disneyland: magical, hectic, and focused on an outsized character.

My presentation was one of eight, four on Saturday and four on Sunday, before an audience of museum members, interested professionals, and the public, in the Legion of Honor’s elegant Gunn Theater:

February 8, 2020, Part I: “Fashion”

“Behind-the-Scenes: Revealing Tissot’s Paint Technique,” by Sarah Kleiner, Associate Paintings Conservator, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

“Chicks with Guns: Tissot’s The Crack Shot and Women’s Relationship to Firearms,” by Nancy Rose Marshall, Professor of Art History, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“James Tissot and ‘the little class’ of the Belle Époque,” by Lucy Paquette, independent art historian

“‘The Impresario:’ Degas – or Tissot?” by Anthea Callen, a frequent expert on BBC’s Fake or Fortune?, Professor Emeritus of Art, Australian National University, Canberra, and Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture, University of Nottingham, U.K.

February 9, 2020, Part II: “Faith”

The Legion of Honor’s lovely Gunn Theater

“Solving the mysteries of Kathleen Newton’s life: New findings and facts,” by Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, independent curator and art historian

“Scientists and Spiritualists Imaging Ghosts at the fin de siècle,” by Serena Keshavjee, Professor of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Winnipeg

“Tissot’s travelogue from the Holy Land,” by Paul Perrin, Curator of Paintings, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

“James Tissot: The Afterlife of an Exhibition,” by Melissa Buron, Director, Art Division, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

The presentations were videotaped, and the Legion of Honor may offer links, which I will share here. Among the highlights of these presentations were:

• Sarah Kleiner’s fascinating analysis, from results of a two-year international collaboration, of Tissot’s techniques and materials, and the discovery that his oils, Self-Portrait (c. 1865, above left, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) and Melancholy (c. 1869, above right, private collection) were painted on two halves of a single panel of mahogany, whose horizontal grain is shown to align by X-radiographs. Such research is useful when dating paintings and considering attribution.

• Anthea Callen’s meticulous exploration of a theory, originally asserted by Richard Thomson in 1988, that the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco’s oil study, The Impresario (c. 1877), is not by Edgar Degas, but James Tissot. I was sold early in her talk, when she noted that Degas did not do the type of preparatory study in oil that was so characteristic of Tissot’s work. But a side-by-side comparison of The Impresario and Tissot’s paintings, Evening (1878) and The Political Woman (c. 1883-85), was even more convincing.

PowerPoint slide by Anthea Callen juxtaposing The Impresario (center, currently attributed to Edgar Degas) with James Tissot’s Evening (left) and The Political Woman (right). The poses of the three male figures are strikingly similar.

• Rear-Admiral H. Bury Palliser at age 56, in Navy & Army Illustrated May 15th 1896. http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/tfs/index.php/Henry_St._Leger_Bury_Palliser

  Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz’s exciting archival research on Kathleen Ashburnham Kelly Newton’s life, and her identification of the Naval officer who seduced her on her journey during August and September of 1870, when she was 16 years old, to marry older widower Dr. Isaac Newton in northwest India as Henry St. Leger Bury Palliser (1839–1907). Directly after the wedding, Kathleen admitted her improper relations with Palliser and found herself alone, penniless and pregnant, asking the doctor to pay for her journey back to England. 

[Palliser, often referred to as “Captain Palliser” in relation to Kathleen Newton, was appointed a Commander in the Royal Navy in 1869. He would have been 31 when he met Kathleen Kelly, who was motherless and fresh out of Gumley House Convent School in Isleworth.]

Dr. Newton divorced Kathleen, and she had her baby (her daughter, Violet Newton, December 20, 1871–December 28, 1933) at her father’s house in Conisbrough, Yorkshire, but she soon moved to London, living with her older sister around the corner from James Tissot’s St. John’s Wood villa.

• Head of Saint James the Elder, 1886-1889, Jerusalem, Armenian Cathedral of Saint James. PowerPoint slide by Paul Perrin.

  Paul Perrin’s amazing discovery of an unknown, 60-page handwritten manuscript by James Tissot – a travelogue of his time in the Holy Land, conducting research for his Bible illustrations. A letter from a publisher in New York indicates that Tissot had plans, which never materialized, to publish his manuscript as a travel epic and guide. Paul announced his even more amazing discovery that Tissot’s travelogue led him to a formerly unattributed painting by Tissot, at The Cathedral of Saint James, a 12th-century Armenian church in Jerusalem.

PowerPoint slide by Melissa Buron

• Melissa’s emotional adieu to the exhibition, now on its way to Paris, where it will be on view, with some variation, from March 23 through July 19, 2020. She calls James Tissot “the most interesting artist in the 19^th century that you’ve never heard of.”

But it’s clear that this is changing.

In 2009, when I began researching James Tissot for my book, The Hammock:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, there was little popular interest in him, and only a handful of scholars were dedicated to researching his life and work. On Twitter, that barometer of cultural awareness, I was alone in posting images of James Tissot’s wonderful paintings after publishing my novel in 2012 and embarking on my blog, The Hammock, to share more about him.

Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née Thérèse Feuillant (1866), by James Tissot. Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

In 2013, Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, curated by Gloria Groome, now Chair of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, was a revelation as an unheralded mini-exhibition of James Tissot’s most spectacular paintings. In New York, at the Met, people (including me) vied for a position close enough to examine the Musée d’Orsay’s relatively new acquisitions, Portrait of the Marquis and Marchioness of Miramon and their children and The Circle of the Rue Royale, clearly reluctant to step away from these poignant, exquisite glimpses of a lost world. And yet, Tissot’s reputation was such that a reviewer for The New York Times disparaged the gorgeous Portrait of Marquise de Miramon as “zealously detailed,” Advertising for this blockbuster exhibition barely mentioned James Tissot – why, when he had no name recognition?

Across the country, Melissa Buron reacted with the same frustration that James Tissot and his work were not receiving their full due when she witnessed the artist’s work overshadowed by his more famous countrymen. She began her efforts towards the Legion of Honor retrospective, and is on the vanguard of a new era of fascination with James Tissot, welcoming new voices and directions in research. Melissa, along with fellow curators Paul Perrin and Marine Kisiel at the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, Paris, and Cyrille Sciama, Director of Musée des impressionnismes Giverny, is bringing Tissot’s work to a wider public and redefining his place in the history of 19th century art.

Tissot scholars indulging in Paul Perrin’s Instagram sensation, #tissotpose

And now, with that new fascination combined with the energy of social media, rather than a few art historians viewing Tissot research as an exclusive domain, Tissot scholarship encompasses everything from a stylish new documentary film on his life and work,  James Tissot, The Ambiguous Figure of Modernity, as France reclaims its former superstar, to stunning recent discoveries of Tissot’s “lost” art, biographical information, and important documents, photographs, and letters that have been “hiding in plain sight,” to Instagram crazes like Paul Perrin’s #tissotpose – and yes, my blog on James Tissot’s life, art, associates and times.

Importantly, what all this accomplishes is to make James Tissot accessible. And what that accomplishes is to make him popular, when one of the greatest frustrations of Tissot scholars is that he is lesser known than his peers such as Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, or the biggest marketing draw, “The Impressionists.” As museum professionals know, a popular artist makes for a well-attended exhibition, in which efforts to engage, inform, and delight a broader audience can have a much greater opportunity for success and satisfaction.

All of this would be immensely rewarding to James Tissot, who believed in himself and his art enough to decline the invitation to exhibit with the Impressionists, who saw his reputation obscured by theirs but who continued to pursue his own idiosyncratic path, knowing that his work was special, significant – and unforgettable.

Special thanks to the following staff at the Legion of Honor:

Lexi Paulson
Administrative Coordinator to the Director, Art Division

Isabella Holland
Curatorial Assistant, European Paintings

Danny Cesena
Audio Visual Technical Coordinator

© 2020 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

Related posts:

James Tissot: Fashion & Faith, a retrospective at the Legion of Honor

James Tissot, the painter art critics still love to hate: a retrospective review round-up

James Tissot, the painter art critics love to hate

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

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.

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. ““Berthe,” “Sunday Morning,” and “The Newspaper”.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2020/03/13/berthe-sunday-morning-and-the-newspaper/ <Date viewed.>

In March, 1883, a few months after Kathleen Newton’s death and James Tissot’s return to Paris, he mounted a large retrospective exhibition of his work that also included eight new pastels. Among them were Le Journal (The Newspaper) and Dimanche Matin (Sunday Morning). Tissot’s pastels were a critical and popular success, during a great revival of the medium that included Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas as well as Giovanni Boldini, Paul César Helleu, and Jean-Louis Forain.

Popular during the Rococo period in France during the eighteenth century, the use of pastels came to be disparaged as the mark of minor artists with frivolous, sentimental subject matter; later, due to its softness and delicacy, pastel was considered an art form suitable for women. The medium became valued for its expressive qualities after it was used with a new creativity in the mid-nineteenth century by Jean-François Millet, and then by the Impressionists during their exhibitions of the 1870s.

As Tissot worked on his La Femme à Paris (Women of Paris, 1883-85) series of fifteen large-scale oil paintings, he executed pastel portraits of numerous prominent Belle Époque parisiennes. But The Newspaper, Sunday Morning, and another pastel, Berthe, featured anonymous models in charming and memorable compositions which he reproduced as prints. Interestingly, while the La Femme à Paris pictures were a critical and popular failure, partly due to their stiff, awkward compositions, pastels seemed to free Tissot up, allowing him the spontaneity not often seen in his oils. And while the subjects of La Femme à Paris were criticized for appearing as “always the same Englishwoman,” the subjects of these three pastels are clearly chic, modern Frenchwomen.

Berthe (1883), by James Tissot. Pastel. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris. Public domain.

Berthe (1883), by James Tissot. Etching and drypoint. Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Public domain.

In Berthe, a sweet-faced woman wearing a straw bonnet reclines on a large golden cushion atop a blue divan. Though Berthe is young, she gazes at the viewer with a direct, straightforward demeanor of independence and confidence.

Unusually Impressionistic for Tissot, this work is highly finished only in the figure’s face, hat, right hand and arm, and the magnificent bow at her throat, with a loose treatment of her lower body. Dry color in stick form, pastels were particularly suited to this sketchy style.

While Berthe was not exhibited until 1885 with La Femme à Paris, at Galerie Sedelmeyer in Paris, and in London in 1886, the etching after it is dated 1883.

This pastel is now in the collection of the Musée du Petit Palais, Paris.

The etched version is in the opposite direction of the pastel. Note how the creases of the dress across the woman’s torso are more defined in this version.

Sunday Morning (Le dimanche matin, 1883), by James Tissot. Etching and drypoint on paper. Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Public domain.

Sunday Morning (Le Dimanche matin) shows a woman, the model from Berthe, carrying a missal on her way to church. The pastel was exhibited at the Palais de l’industrie in 1883. Its current whereabouts are unknown.

The Newspaper (Le journal, 1883), by James Tissot. Pastel. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris. Public domain.

The Newspaper (Le journal, 1883), by James Tissot. Etching and drypoint. The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Public domain.

The Newspaper (Le journal, 1883) depicts a sophisticated, modern woman, keeping au courant by reading the newspaper, and wearing a stylish hat and coat and elegant pince-nez. She is older than the woman in Berthe and Sunday Morning, and projects a settled self-reliance as she immerses herself in the news. Tissot has drawn a ring on the third finger of her left hand, indicating she is married and therefore respectable. The ring may not have been visible had Tissot depicted her holding the paper in the more usual manner.

The pastel, now in the collection of the Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, was exhibited at the Palais de l’industrie in 1883 and at the Galerie Sedelmeyer in 1885, alongside Tissot’s series of fifteen large-scale paintings of various incarnations of modern parisiennes, La Femme à Paris (Women of Paris).

In the etched version, Tissot added chestnut leaves behind the woman’s head, setting her outdoors. Curiously, in the reversed composition, Tissot chose to show the woman’s wedding ring on the third finger of her right hand – a cue as to her marital status that also provides a note of visual interest between the light form of the newspaper and the dark form of the woman’s torso.

Pastels are sensitive to light and not often on public display.

Related posts:

Belle Époque Portraits in Pastel by James Tissot

James Tissot’s Prints

Tissot’s La Femme à Paris series

© 2020 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library

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

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “The James Tissot Gift Shop.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/the-james-tissot-gift-shop/. <Date viewed.>

April 1 is my birthday, so you must expect my annual tradition of a little gentle humor. This year, it’s a little levity during a challenging time as my gift to you: we’re all in this together, and we need to keep our spirits up however we can. Art lovers hunkered down all over the world, this is for you.

Inspired by a Twitter thread last year, in which items found for sale online – such as a shower curtain printed with Lord Byron on his Death Bed (c. 1826, by Joseph-Denis Odevaere) – were suggested for the gift shop at Byron’s ancestral home, Newstead Abbey…allow me to present The James Tissot Gift Shop. Imagine the possibilities for redecorating your home, and transforming your personal style, à la Tissot during the lockdown necessary to keep us all as safe as possible during the coronavirus pandemic.

Shop online, or distract yourself for a few minutes by browsing! You can begin every day on an upbeat note, confidently sipping coffee in your very own Still on Top mug. And don’t prepare another breakfast without your new Ladies of the Cars Apron! Maybe you’d like to linger over breakfast in bed, using your “Waiting for the Fairy” [sic] Serving Tray. [We’re all waiting for the fairy.] Remember to cough into your elbow or your The Bridesmaid napkins. 

Smooth your The Shop Girl duvet cover and replace all your worn hand towels and bath towels with new ones featuring Tissot’s paintings, such as A Woman of Ambition – an image sure to jump-start any endeavor, from organizing your book shelves to home-schooling your children.

Self-care is important; if you’d like the artist moodily assessing you each morning, try this shower curtain.

Settle in for the weeks ahead. Toss James Tissot throw pillows on all your armchairs and sofas, suited to your lifestyle and personality: On the Thames, 1876 Throw Pillow or The Captain and the Mate, 1873 Throw Pillow if you’re adventurous; Room Overlooking the Harbour Throw Pillow  or Chrysanthemums, 1876 Throw Pillow if you’re the contemplative type; Hide and Seek Throw Pillow if you have children; or, if you feel the urge to belong vicariously to an elite private club of aristocrats idling away the day (before the days of social distancing) on a balcony of the Hôtel de Coislin overlooking the Place de la Concorde in Paris, the Circle of the rue Royale Throw Pillow.

If you must leave your house, perhaps to stock up on dried beans and canned tuna, you’ll need the Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon Reusable Grocery Bag.

And if you think, as I do, that the Marquise, née Thérèse Feuillant, is exquisite, you’ll also want her image on a Set of car mats as well as the Crossbody Bag as you deliver some supplies to a neighbor or two.

Otherwise, stay home and make good use of her image on your new Ping Pong Paddle and Playing cards while wearing the All-Over Printed Unisex Tank.

You can find dozens of jigsaw puzzles from Tissot paintings to keep you and your family busy, including the lovely “The Bunch of Lilacs” jigsaw puzzle, “Holyday” jigsaw puzzle, and “Afternoon Tea” jigsaw puzzle. And if you’re a reader, you’ll definitely want to download The Hammock: a novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot (remember, there are free reading apps available on Amazon for your PC, tablet and smartphone).

There’s no James Tissot coloring book, but since his paintings showcase women’s fashions of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, lose yourself in the Godey’s Fashions Coloring Book, Late Victorian and Edwardian Fashions Coloring Book, or Victorian Gowns Coloring Book (coloring can be very soothing, since it requires little effort and maintains your focus on something positive and beautiful).

Looking for another creative outlet? You can cross-stitch some of Tissot’s compositions, such as The Gallery of the HMS Calcutta and Reading a Book.

Or enjoy the comfort of baking, using your “Waiting for the Ferry” Cake Pan.

It’s user-recommended as a “nice bridal shower gift,” but don’t be tempted to socialize: please do your part and consume your cakes at home!

Daintily snacking on your own cake is, possibly, one activity for which you’ll enjoy social distancing.

Do stay fit at home with a wide range of James Tissot yoga mats, though you must brace yourself for the options, which include the Abandoned yoga mat (above), the Prehistoric Women Yoga Mat (left, for a wild workout), and a full selection from Tissot’s Bible illustrations, such as the Adam Is Tempted by Eve Yoga Mat, The Wise Virgins yoga mat, the Blind Leading the Blind Yoga Mat, and the truly egregious Jesus in Prison yoga mat (right). You may instead find yourself enchanted by the ethereal beauty and fresh, pure landscape of the Autumn on the Thames yoga mat.

Just remember to stay hydrated with your “Quiet” Stainless Steel Water Bottle.” (Though by now, you also may need either A Type of Beauty beer steins or, at least, the A Type of Beauty hip flask.)

But since James Tissot was acclaimed for illustrating the Bible, there are any number of items available reproducing this body of work, which may strike you as irreverent or devotional depending upon your perspective.

As a sampler, let’s look at items featuring his painting, Jesus Walks on the Sea: a table lamp, a pendant lamp [temporarily sold out], a night light, a light switch cover (which, really, was not the best idea), an LED candle, and a snow globe.

There’s also the “Jesus Walks on the Sea” Cutting Board and the “Jesus Walks on the Sea” bottle opener, to which 81% of users give a 5-star rating.

And there are still other ways that The James Tissot Gift Shop can help us make the best of our altered reality.

Working from your new home office? Keep an eye on the time with your The Woman Of Fashion Clock.

If you require new binders to sort your paperwork, there’s something for everyone, e.g. the Emmanuel Chabrier, aged 20, 1861 3-ring binder and the A Tedious Story 3-ring binder (to stuff with everything from tax documents to incoming mail you just cannot deal with right now).

Need to scribble a shopping list while foraging in the pantry for the mid-day meal? This A Luncheon notebook will come in handy.

But what you really need to organize your every rendez-vous – yes, all those video conferences, FaceTime group calls, Google Hangouts, and daily Skype chats to keep tabs on Grandma and Grandpa – is a planner featuring A Luncheon.

If you’re musical, you’ll be happy to know that A Luncheon also is available on a guitar pick.

Maybe you lack that particular talent, but still, you can “bump up the volume of your favorite jams” with the “Waiting at the Station speaker.”

Be sure to use this time to enliven your wardrobe with some James Tissot style.

Women can start with some investment pieces, such as these “James Tissot Young Lady In A Boat Crew Socks.”

Step up your game by pairing your new socks with the “Studio11Couture Women Hoodie Dress Hooded Tunic James Tissot Young Lady In A Boat Athleisure Sweatshirt.” You know you want it! No need to pad around your apartment in sweat pants when you can be this glam in comfort.

Male admirers of James Tissot will have to be content, for the foreseeable future, with T-shirts and hoodies until public gatherings again are permissible.

Then, you can sport enough chic ties, announcing your newfound fashion sense, to bring every passing stranger within three feet of you. Prepare yourself.

In the meantime, be safe, my dears! Wash your hands, look out for your loved ones and your neighbors, and stay home. Thanks for sharing a little laughter to celebrate my birthday with me.

And in light of the Covid-19 crisis, there’s one last item in The James Tissot Gift Shop you might consider: The Lord’s Prayer Coffee Mug.

Note: All merchandise is featured for informational purposes only. No endorsement or advertising is intended or implied for any goods, services, or companies, and no compensation has been received by the author.

Previous April Fool’s Day posts:

The Missing Tissot Nudes

Was James Tissot a Plagiarist?

Tissot and his Friends Clown Around

Happy Hour with James Tissot

Tissot’s Tiger Skin: A Prominent Prop

James Tissot, the painter art critics love to hate

Paris, 1885-1900

©  2020 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

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

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

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

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “Ten “missing” Tissot paintings that turned up.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2020/04/15/ten-missing-tissot-paintings-that-turned-up/. <Date viewed.>

Six decades ago, before scholars revived interest in James Tissot, well over a hundred of his oil paintings were unlocated, known only from the photograph album he kept as a record of his artistic output over the course of his career, or from exhibition catalogues, the occasional contemporary photograph, or written references.

Modern James Tissot scholarship began in earnest when Michael J. Wentworth (1938–2002) wrote about the artist for the catalogue of the exhibition “A Generation of Draughtsmen” at the University of Michigan in 1962. Wentworth then was invited to take part in the first retrospective exhibition in 1968, organized by the Rhode Island School of Design and the Art Gallery of Ontario, joining Henri Zerner and David S. Brooke in writing the catalogue. In 1965, Willard E. Misfeldt (1930–2017) began work on a monographic study produced in 1971 as a doctoral dissertation for Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and in 1976, Wentworth produced another such monograph for Harvard University, followed by James Tissot: Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1978).

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, U.K.. (Photo:  Wikimedia.org)

One of the most dramatic rediscoveries of a “missing” oil painting by Tissot at this time was Portrait of Mrs Catherine Smith Gill and Two of her Children (1877). 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).  At 60.04 by 39.96 in./152.5 by 101.5 cm, it was one of the largest works the artist ever had produced. 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, Liverpool.

In Michael Wentworth’s comprehensive 1984 study, James Tissot (Oxford: Oxford University Press), numerous oil paintings whose location remained unknown were listed and appeared as old photographs, many provided by auction houses that once had offered them for sale, but since lost track of them. Surely due to the increased recognition of James Tissot’s work, many of these “lost” paintings reappeared.

Where were they, then, during the early 1980s as they were the subject of scholarly interest? Let’s look at a few of these pictures that, happily, turned up.

At least two of Tissot’s “missing” paintings were in public collections, but overlooked.

On the River (1871), measuring 85 by 49.5 cm, was sold by a private collector at Sotheby’s, London for $ 1,175/£ 420 in 1964. It was purchased by Jeremy Maas, a London art dealer who sold it to the U.K. Department of the Environment in 1973. As part of the Government Art Collection, On the River is now at the British Embassy in Paris.

At the Rifle Range (also known as Safe to Win, or The Crack Shot, 1869), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 26 5/8 by 18 ¼ in. (67.3 by 46.4 cm). Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, England, National Trust. Photographed by Lucy Paquette at “James Tissot: Fashion and Faith, Legion of Honor,” San Francisco.

Another painting in an overlooked public collection was At the Rifle Range (also known as Safe to Win, or The Crack Shot, 1869). In his 1984 monograph, James Tissot, Wentworth listed it as “whereabouts unknown,” reproducing an image of it from James Laver’s 1936 book, “Vulgar Society:” the Romantic Career of James Tissot, 1836-1902. In fact, the painting had been acquired by 1936 by the Leicester Galleries in London. Captain George Bambridge (1892–1943), a British diplomat who was married to Rudyard Kipling’s daughter, Elsie (1896–1976), purchased the painting in 1937. From 1938, the childless couple resided at Wimpole Hall, about 8½ miles (14 kilometres) southwest of Cambridge. At the Rifle Range, along with the residence and all its contents, had been left to the National Trust Collections by Mrs. George Bambridge on her death in 1976 and was on display to the public.

Un déjeuner (A Luncheon, c.1868), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 78.74 by 58.42 cm. Roy Miles Fine Paintings. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library for use in “The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot,” by Lucy Paquette © 2012

A few of Tissot’s “lost” paintings had been located by one of these two mid-century scholars, but not the other, as they pursued their parallel research.

For example, in his 1971 thesis, Willard Misfeldt listed A Luncheon (Un déjeuner c. 1868) as unlocated, but in his monograph thirteen years later, Michael Wentworth reported it was in the collection of the Marquis of Bristol, London [Victor Frederick Cochrane Hervey, 6th Marquess of Bristol (1915–1985); after the death of his eldest son, John Hervey, 7th Marquess of Bristol (1954–1999), Un déjeuner was offered for sale at Sotheby’s, New York in 2000 and is now in a private collection].

But, oddly enough, although Misfeldt reported the location of The Partie carrée in his 1971 study as a private collection in Zurich, Wentworth listed it in 1984 as “whereabouts unknown.”

The Partie carrée (c. 1870), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 47 by 56 in. (114.3 by 142.2 cm). National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photographed by Lucy Paquette at “James Tissot: Fashion and Faith, Legion of Honor,” San Francisco.

In fact, The Partie carrée (The Foursome, c. 1870), exhibited at Salon of 1870, had over the years belonged to collectors in Paris and London until being acquired by a private collector in Zurich by 1968.

In 1993, it was offered for sale at Sotheby’s, London, but it did not find a buyer until it was offered again at Sotheby’s, New York in 1995.

It was in a private collection on the U.S. West Coast by 2001, resold, and purchased in 2018 by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Unsurprisingly, it turned out that most of Tissot’s “lost” works belonged to private collectors in the U.K. and the U.S., where his work was most appreciated during his life.

Melancholy (c. 1869), by James Tissot. Oil on wood panel, 19.5 by 14.75 (49.5 by 37.5 cm). Collection of Ann and Gordon Getty. Photographed by Lucy Paquette at “James Tissot: Fashion and Faith, Legion of Honor,” San Francisco.

The trail had gone cold on Melancholy (c. 1869) after it was sold in 1967 at Sotheby’s, London as Chagrin d’amour, to a private collector. In 1995, that collector sold the picture at the same auction house, where it was considered “a significant rediscovery in the field of nineteenth-century Anglo-French painting.” It now is in the collection of Ann and Gordon Getty, whose foundation provides support for the arts and education in the San Francisco area.

Waiting (also known as In the Shallows, 1873), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 22 by 31 in. (55.9 by 78.8 cm). Collection of Diane B. Wilsey, San Francisco. Photographed by Lucy Paquette at “James Tissot: Fashion and Faith, Legion of Honor,” San Francisco.

Tissot exhibited Waiting (also known as In the Shallows, 1873) at the Royal Academy in 1874, along with The Ball on Shipboard (c.1874, Tate) and London Visitors (c.1874, Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio), and though it changed hands numerous times, it remained in the U.K until at least 1896, when it was sold at Christie’s and dropped off the radar. In 2014, Waiting once again was offered for sale at Christie’s, London. Estimated to bring $ 849,500–$ 1,359,200/£ 500,000–£ 800,000, it actually sold for $ 1,635,288/£ 962,500 (Premium). It now is in the collection of Diane B. Wilsey, San Francisco.

Other paintings that had not been located by the early 1980s were in collections outside the U.K. and the U.S.:

Rivals (c. 1878-1879), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 36.25 by 26.75 in. (92 by 68 cm). The Marlene and Spencer Hays Collection. (Photograph: the-athenaeum.org)

Rivals (c. 1878-1879), featuring Kathleen Newton, was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879 and was owned by successive private collectors in the U.K. through mid-1912. The Rivals then was purchased for the Ingegnoli Collection in Milan. It was sold by Paul Ingegnoli’s executors at Galleria Pesaro in 1933 and purchased by a Milanese private collector. It was displayed in public again only in Milan, in 1957, at the Palazzo della Permanente, La Mostra Nazionale di Pittura, “L’Arte e il Convito.”

Then, in 2014, it was sold at Pandolfini Casa d’Aste, Florence, for € 954,600 EUR (Premium) [$ 1,215,969 USD/£ 753,715 GBP]. In pristine condition, it was acquired by Stair Sainty Fine Art, London and displayed at the Stair Sainty booth at TEFAF, the world’s leading art fair, in Maastricht, Netherlands (March 13-22, 2015). The Rivals is now in The Marlene and Spencer Hays Collection; the Hays, an American couple who began collecting French art in the 1970s, chose the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to receive their collection at their deaths.

Women of Paris: Provincial Woman (La Femme à Paris: Les demoiselles de province, c. 1883-1885), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 58 by 40.25 in. (147.3 by 102.2 cm). Collection of Diane B. Wilsey, San Francisco. (Photo:  Wikimedia.org)

Les demoiselles de province (Provincial Woman, c. 1883-1885), from La Femme à Paris (Women of Paris) Tissot’s series of fifteen large-scale canvases depicting fashionable parisiennes, was in the U.K. at least through 1905, when it seemed to “go missing.” But since at least 1955, it was in a private collection in Rotterdam and was left to an individual who passed away. It was sold at Christie’s, London in 2015 for £ 1,202,500/$ 1,867,483. It is now in the Collection of Diane B. Wilsey, San Francisco.

The Apparition (1885), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 29 1/8 by 21 1/4 in. (74 by 54 cm). Private collection. Photographed by Lucy Paquette at “James Tissot: Fashion and Faith, Legion of Honor,” San Francisco.

At least one of Tissot’s oil paintings, which seems to have disappeared after his death in 1902, recently turned up “in plain sight” – while curators were researching the 2019-2020 James Tissot retrospective exhibition, they were delighted to find that The Apparition (1885) had long been in a private collection on the estate of the remote château in Besançon, in eastern France, once owned by the artist.

Many more of James Tissot’s paintings are still “missing.” When and where will these elusive works turn up?

Related posts:

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

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

The Stars of Victorian Painting: Auction Prices

James Tissot oils at auction: Seven favorites

© 2020 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

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

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

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

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “Tissot’s Illustrations for Renée Mauperin (1884).” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2020/05/15/tissots-illustrations-for-renee-mauperin-1884/. <Date viewed>.

Renée Mauperin, a novel by brothers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, initially was published in 1864, then in several other editions, before surviving brother Edmond discussed illustrations for a new edition with James Tissot in late May 1882, in Paris. At the time, Tissot was living in London with young Kathleen Newton, who had moved into his St. John’s Wood home around 1876.

Kathleen, declining from tuberculosis, would model for the novel’s tragic heroine, who in the last third of the story suffered from debilitating heart disease. Some of Tissot’s illustrations were based on photographs of Kathleen, and he posed for some of the male figures. Her son Cecil Newton appears in one of the etchings, along with girls who may have been his sister, Violet, and Kathleen’s sister’s daughters, Belle and Lilian.

Edmond de Goncourt (c. 1877), by Nadar. (Wiki)

Kathleen Newton died of tuberculosis on November 9, 1882, at age 28, 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. On the morning of November 15, he called on Edmond de Goncourt, who noted in his journal that the artist was “very affected by the death of the English Mauperin.”

Renée Mauperin, illustrated with ten etchings by James Tissot, was published in 1884 in Paris by Charpentier.

In 1888, the English edition, published by Vizetelly, contained a prefatory note by Émile Zola:

“For many people…this is Messieurs de Goncourt’s masterpiece. The authors’ object has been to depict a phase of contemporary middle-class life. Their heroine, Renée, the most prominent personage of the story, is a strange girl, half a boy, who has been brought up in the chaste ignorance of virgins..Spoilt by her father, she has grown upon the dunghill of advanced civilization with an artistic soul and a nervous, refined temperament. She is the most adorable little thing imaginable, she talks slang, she paints and acts, her mind is awake to every form of curiosity, and she is possessed of masculine pride, straightforwardness, and honesty.”

However, due to an action she takes, her brother, Henri, is killed in a duel, and “Renée, horrified by what she has done, slowly dies of heart disease, her distressing agony lasting through nearly one-third of the volume.”

Below, excerpts from the novel accompany each etching, providing the story in brief. I have used The Project Gutenberg eBook, Renée Mauperin, by Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, et al., Translated by Alys Hallard (1902).

RENÉE MAUPERIN: RENÉE AND REVERCHON SWIMMING IN THE SEINE (FRONTISPIECE), by James Tissot. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Open Access.

I

“You would soon find out what a bore it is to be always proper. We are allowed to dance, but do you imagine that we can talk to our partner? We may say ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘No,’ ‘Yes,’ and that’s all! We must always keep to monosyllables, as that is considered proper. You see how delightful our existence is. And for everything it is just the same. If we want to be very proper we have to act like simpletons; and for my part I cannot do it. Then we are supposed to stop and prattle to persons of our own sex. And if we go off and leave them and are seen talking to men instead – oh, well, I’ve had lectures enough from mamma about that!”

This was said in an arm of the Seine just between Briche and the Île Saint Denis. The girl and the young man who were conversing were in the water. They had been swimming until they were tired, and now, carried along by the current, they had caught hold of a rope which was fastened to one of the large boats stationed along the banks of the island.

“Ah, now this, for instance,” she continued, “cannot be at all proper – to be swimming here with you.”

Renee Mauperin: Renee Hugging her Father as She Comes in to Breakfast (Beraldi 54)
James Tissot, French, 1836–1902
Etching. Plate: 14.1 x 10 cm (5 9/16 x 3 15/16 in.) sheet: 19.1 x 16 cm. (7 1/2 x 6 5/16 in.)
Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. x1944-250 a. Princeton University Art Museum, public domain for personal and educational use.

IX

“Well!” exclaimed Renée, entering the dining-room at eleven o’clock, breathless like a child who had been running, “I thought every one would be down. Where is mamma?”

“Gone to Paris – shopping,” answered M. Mauperin.

“Good-morning, papa!” And instead of taking her seat Renée went across to her father and putting her arms round his neck began to kiss him.

“There, there, that’s enough – you silly child!” said M. Mauperin, smiling as he endeavoured to free himself.

And Renée, standing up after kissing him once more, moved back from her father, still holding his head between her hands. They gazed at each other lovingly and earnestly, looking into one another’s eyes. The French window was open and the light, the scents and the various noises from the garden penetrated into the room.

RENÉE MAUPERIN: DENOISEL READING IN THE GARDEN, RENÉE APPROACHING, by James Tissot. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Open Access.

IX

Denoisel, left to himself, lighted a cigar, picked up a book and went out to one of the garden seats to read. He had been there about two hours when he saw Renée coming towards him. She had her hat on and her animated face shone with joy and a sort of serene excitement.

“Well, have you been out? Where have you come from?”

“Where have I come from?” repeated Renée, unfastening her hat. “Well, I’ll tell you, as you are my friend,” and she took her hat off and threw her head back with that pretty gesture women have for shaking their hair into place. “I’ve come from church, and if you want to know what I’ve been doing there, why, I’ve been asking God to let me die before papa.”

Renee Mauperin: Renee Sitting at the Piano, Crying
James Tissot, French, 1836–1902
Etching. Plate: 14.3 x 9.8 cm. (5 5/8 x 3 7/8 in.) sheet: 28.7 x 22.3 cm. (11 5/16 x 8 3/4 in.)
Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. x1944-252 a
Princeton University Art Museum, public domain for personal and educational use.

XXVII

Denoisel had left Renée at her piano, and had gone out into the garden. As he came back towards the house he was surprised to hear her playing something that was not the piece she was learning; then all at once the music broke off and all was silent. He went to the drawing-room, pushed the door open, and discovered Renée seated on the music-stool, her face buried in her hands, weeping bitterly.

“Renée, good heavens! What in the world is the matter?”

Two or three sobs prevented Renée’s answering at first, and then, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands, as children do, she said in a voice choked with tears:

“It’s – it’s – too stupid. It’s this thing of Chopin’s, for his funeral, you know – his funeral mass, that he composed. Papa always tells me not to play it. As there was no one in the house to-day – I thought you were at the bottom of the garden – oh, I knew very well what would happen, but I wanted to make myself cry with it, and you see it has answered to my heart’s content. Isn’t it silly of me – and for me, too, when I’m naturally so fond of fun!”

Renee Mauperin: Denoisel and Henri Mauperin in the Latter’s Rooms (Beraldi 57)
James Tissot, French, 1836–1902
Etching; early state. Plate: 10.1 x 14 cm (4 x 5 1/2 in.) sheet: 21.5 x 28.8 cm (8 7/16 x 11 5/16 in.)
Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. x1944-253 a
Princeton University Art Museum, public domain for personal and educational use.

XXXIV

Denoisel was at Henri Mauperin’s. They were sitting by the fire talking and smoking. Suddenly they heard a noise and a discussion in the hall, and, almost at the same time, the room door was opened violently and a man entered abruptly, pushing aside the domestic who was trying to keep him back.

“M. Mauperin de Villacourt?” he demanded.

“That is my name, monsieur,” said Henri, rising.

“Well, my name is Boisjorand de Villacourt,” and with the back of his hand he gave Henri a blow which made his face bleed. Henri turned as white as the silk scarf he was wearing as a necktie and, with the blood trickling down his face, he bent forward to return the blow, and then, just as suddenly, drew himself up and stretched his hand out towards Denoisel, who stepped forward, folded his arms, and spoke in his calmest tone:

“I think I understand what you mean, sir,” he said; “you consider that there is a Villacourt too many. I think so too.”

The visitor was visibly embarrassed before the calmness of this man of the world. He took off his hat, which he had kept on his head hitherto, and began to stammer out a few words.

“Will you kindly leave your address with my servant?” said Henri, interrupting him; “I will send round to you to-morrow.”

RENÉE MAUPERIN: HENRI MAUPERIN WOUNDED AFTER THE DUEL WITH BOISJORAND DE VILLACOURT, by James Tissot. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Open Access.

XXXVIII

M. de Villacourt took off his frock-coat, tore off his necktie, and threw them both some distance from him. His shirt was open at the neck, showing his strong, broad, hairy chest. The opponents were armed, and the seconds moved back and stood together on one side.

“Ready!” cried a voice.

At this word M. de Villacourt moved forward almost in a straight line. Henri kept quite still and allowed him to walk five paces. At the sixth he fired.

M. de Villacourt fell to the ground, and the witnesses watched him lay down his pistol and press his thumbs with all his strength on the double hole which the bullet had made on entering his body.

“Ah! I’m not done for – Ready, monsieur!” he called out in a loud voice to Henri, who, thinking all was over, was moving away.

M. de Villacourt picked up his pistol and proceeded to do his four remaining paces as far as the walking-stick, dragging himself along on his hands and knees and leaving a track of blood on the snow behind him. On arriving at the stick he rested his elbow on the ground and took aim slowly and steadily.

“Fire! Fire!” called out Dardouillet.

Henri, standing still and covering his face with his pistol, was waiting. He was pale, and there was a proud, haughty look about him. The shot was fired; he staggered a second, then fell flat, with his face on the ground and with outstretched arms, his twitching fingers grasping for a moment at the snow.

Renee Mauperin: Renee Fainting after Hearing of her Brother’s Death in the Duel
James Tissot, French, 1836–1902
Etching. Plate: 11 x 14.2 cm. (4 5/16 x 5 9/16 in.) sheet: 22.5 x 22.8 cm. (8 7/8 x 9 in.)
Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. x1944-255 a
Princeton University Art Museum, public domain for personal and educational use.

XL

Denoisel opened the drawing-room door and saw Renée, seated on an ottoman, sobbing, with her handkerchief up to her mouth.

“Renée,” he said, going to her and taking her hands in his, “some one killed him –”

Renée looked at him and then lowered her eyes.

“That man would never have known; he never read anything and he did not see any one; he lived like a regular wolf; he didn’t subscribe to the Moniteur, of course. Do you understand?”

“No,” stammered Renée, trembling all over.

“Well, it must have been an enemy who sent the paper to that man. Ah, you can’t understand such cowardly things; but that’s how it all came about, though. One of his seconds showed me the paper with the paragraph marked –”

Renée was standing up, her eyes wide open with terror; her lips moved and she opened her mouth to speak – to cry out: “I sent it!”

Then all at once she put her hand to her heart, as if she had just been wounded there, and fell down unconscious and rigid on the carpet.

Renee Mauperin: M. Mauperin Sitting in a Public Garden in Paris
James Tissot, French, 1836–1902
Etching. Plate: 14 x 9.7 cm. (5 1/2 x 3 13/16 in.) sheet: 19 x 15.7 cm. (7 1/2 x 6 3/16 in.)
Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. x1944-256 a
Princeton University Art Museum, public domain for personal and educational use.

XLIV

Sometimes, as though he were answering inquiries about his daughter, he would say aloud, “Oh, yes, she is very ill!” and it was as though the words he had uttered had been said by some one else at his side. Often a work-girl without any hat, a pretty young girl with a round waist, gay and healthy with the rude health of her class, would pass by him. He would cross the street that he might not see her again. He was furious just for a minute with all these people who passed him, with all these useless lives. They were not beloved as his daughter was, and there was no need for them to go on living. He went into one of the public gardens and sat down. A child put some of its little sand-pies on to the tails of his coat; other children getting bolder approached him with all the daring of sparrows. Presently, feeling slightly embarrassed, they left their little spades, stopped playing and stood round, looking shyly and sympathetically, like so many men and women in miniature, at this tall gentleman who was so sad. M. Mauperin rose and left the garden.

Renee Mauperin: Renee and Her Father Sitting in the Porch of the Church at Morimond
James Tissot, French, 1836–1902
Etching. Plate: 15.1 x 9.6 cm. (5 15/16 x 3 3/4 in.) sheet: 33.4 x 20.5 cm. (13 1/8 x 8 1/16 in.)
Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. x1944-257 b
Princeton University Art Museum, public domain for personal and educational use.

LI

There was a stone seat under the porch with a ray of sunshine falling on it.

“It’s warm here,” she said, laying her hand on the stone. “Put my shawl there so that I can sit down a little. I shall have the sun on my back—there.”

“Ah!” said Renée after a few moments, “we ought to have been made of something else. Why did God make us of flesh and blood? It’s frightful!”

Her eyes had fallen on some soil turned up in a corner of the cemetery, half hidden by two barrel-hoops crossed over each other and up which wild convolvulus was growing.

Renee Mauperin: M. and Mme. Mauperin in Egypt, 1882
James Tissot, French, 1836–1902
Etching. Plate: 10.7 x 14 cm. (4 3/16 x 5 1/2 in.) sheet: 21 x 33.2 cm. (8 1/4 x 13 1/16 in.)
Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. x1944-258 b
Princeton University Art Museum, public domain for personal and educational use.

LXV

People who travel in far countries may have come across, in various cities or among old ruins – one year in Russia, another perhaps in Egypt – an elderly couple who seem to be always moving about, neither seeing nor even looking at anything. They are the Mauperins, the poor heart-broken father and mother, who are now quite alone in the world, Renée’s sister having died after the birth of her first child.

They sold all they possessed and set out to wander round the world. They no longer care for anything, and go about from one country to another, from one hotel to the next, with no interest whatever in life. They are like things which have been uprooted and flung to the four winds of heaven. They wander about like exiles on earth, rushing away from their tombs, but carrying their dead about with them everywhere, endeavouring to weary out their grief with the fatigue of railway journeys, dragging all that is left them of life to the very ends of the earth, in the hope of wearing it out and so finishing with it.

Related posts:

James Tissot’s Prints

James Tissot’s Model and Muse, Kathleen Newton

Was Cecil Newton James Tissot’s son?

James Tissot Domesticated

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

© 2020 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library  

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

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “The few images of people of color by the Impressionists and James Tissot.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/the-few-images-of-people-of-color-by-the-impressionists-and-james-tissot/. <Date viewed>.

How hard is it to think of an Impressionist painting that features a black model?

Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining (Jeanne Duval, 1862), by Édouard Manet. Oil on canvas, 90 by 113 cm. Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest, Hungary. (Wiki)

And yet, surely you’ve seen Manet’s painting, Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining (1862). That skirt! The subject, Jeanne Duval, is no shrinking violet; in fact, her bold posture and frank gaze makes the aristocratic Berthe Morisot seem timid in Manet’s Repose (c. 1871).

Repose (c. 1871), by Édouard Manet. Rhode Island School of Design Museum

Jeanne Duval was born in Haiti in the 1820s. Duval’s grandmother, a slave from Guinea, was sent to Europe to work in a brothel, and it’s likely that Jeanne’s father and grandfather were both white.

When she moved to France, she played bit parts at a small theater in the Latin Quarter, where she met the man who would become known as the photographer Nadar. She was Nadar’s mistress in 1838-39, when he was 18 and 19. In 1842, his friend, a free-spending dandy named Charles Baudelaire, saw her perform and was immediately infatuated with her; she became his “mistress of mistresses.”

Scholarly articles by Marc Christophe (1990) and Therese Dolan (1997) shed light on their intense and stormy twenty-year relationship, and Duval was the subject of a major exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2003 based on the work of poet, artist, photographer and historian Maud Sulter.

Jeanne Duval (c. 1850), by Charles Baudelaire

Nadar, who did not photograph Duval, described her in terms equally sexist and racist which are only hinted at in this brief excerpt: “A tall, almost too tall girl…A special dish for the ultra-refined palate. Beneath the impetuous luxuriance of her ink-black and curling mane, her eyes, large as soup-plates, seemed blacker still…She looked serious, proud, even a bit disdainful.  Her figure was long-waisted, graceful and undulating as a snake…”

Gustave Courbet painted Duval standing next to Baudelaire in The Artist’s Studio (1854-55, Musée d’Orsay), but the figure was removed at the poet’s request after a quarrel. Four years later, Duval suffered a stroke. In 1862, Baudelaire told his mother his liaison with Duval was over, but three years later, while in Brussels, he made a pen and ink drawing of her (below) from memory.

Portrait of Jeanne Duval (1865), by Charles Baudelaire. Pencil and ink, 20.6 by 14.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay (Wiki)

Manet exhibited his painting of Duval in 1865, at the Galerie Martinet. Nadar claimed to have last seen Duval around 1870, on crutches and rapidly declining from syphilis. (Baudelaire, who had shown symptoms of syphilis from the time he met Duval, died from its effects in 1867.) Manet’s untitled, undated picture was found in his studio after his death in 1883, and his wife, Suzanne, helped the notaries to title it merely Baudelaire’s Mistress for their inventory. A small watercolor version is in the collection of the Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany.

In 1861 or 1862, Manet painted a black nurse with the little girl on the right in Children in the Tuileries Gardens (Rhode Island School of Design Museum). Only recently has the woman been identified as Laure; Manet described her as a “very beautiful black woman” and recorded her address in a studio notebook.

Children in the Tuileries Gardens (c. 1861-62), by Édouard Manet. Oil on canvas, 37.8 x 46 cm (14 7/8 x 18 1/8 inches). Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

In 1862, Manet painted a bust-length portrait of an unnamed woman, La Négresse, now subtitled Portrait of Laure (Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli Gallery, Turin, Italy), which later was owned by Manet’s one-time student, Éva Gonzalès.

La Négresse (Portrait of Laure), by Édouard Manet. Oil on canvas, 61 by 50 cm (24 by 20 in.). Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli Gallery, Turin, Italy (Wiki)

And now we know it is Laure who modeled for the maid in Olympia, which Manet exhibited at the Salon in 1865.

An important work on the black female body is “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” written in 1992 by American artist and critic Lorraine O’Grady. But it was Denise Murrell   who discovered that this black woman was named Laure, a “free, wage-earning woman” who lived among the Impressionists in the Batignolles neighborhood of Paris, in researching her 2014 thesis, “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today.”

This research was the basis for an exhibition of the same name held at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery in New York from October 24, 2018 – February 10, 2019. Dr. Murrell, the museum’s first Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar, curated the show. An expanded version, “The Black Model, from Géricault to Matisse,” was held at the Musée d’Orsay from March 26 – July 14, 2019, and Dr. Murrell was a co-curator. In January of this year, she began her new post of associate curator for 19th- and 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, making her the first full-time black curator on the Met’s staff.

Olympia (1863), by Édouard Manet. Oil on canvas, 130 by 190 cm. Musée d’Orsay. (Wiki)

In 1869 or 1870, Frédéric Bazille painted La Toilette, featuring an exotically-garbed black servant in the foreground, viewed from the back and partially nude. He believed the Salon jury would be impressed by this Orientalist touch, and so he spared no expense. “I have found a ravishing model who is going to cost me an arm and a leg,” he wrote to his mother, “10 francs a day plus bus fare for her and for her mother who accompanies her.” He later added the figure on the right, believed to be Lise Tréhot, Renoir’s companion and model. The jury rejected this work for the Salon in 1870, perhaps punishing Bazille for a painterly style too similar to Manet’s.

La Toilette, by Frédéric Bazille. Oil on canvas, 52 by 50 in. (132 by 127 cm). Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France. (Wiki)

Bazille also painted his new model in modern attire in Young Woman with Peonies (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) in 1870, giving the completed canvas to his friend, the musician and art collector, Edmond Maître.

Young Woman with Peonies (1870), by Frédéric Bazille. Oil on canvas, 60 by 74 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

A second version of this painting is known as African Woman with Peonies. Though the model is unknown, it is striking that Bazille featured her in these attentive character studies. She, with her expressive eyes, hands and self-possessed demeanor, is the subject of both canvases, amid the Dutch-inspired floral still life. Who knows how else he may have depicted this woman who knew her own worth and whom he valued, had he not been killed in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, at age 28? His family kept this painting until his brother gifted it and La Toilette to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier in 1918.

African Woman with Peonies (1870), by Frédéric Bazille. Oil on canvas, 60 by 75 cm. Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France. (Wiki)

Another artist who was killed in the Franco-Prussian War, Henri Regnault, painted a black model, a man, in a grisly work, Execution without Judgment under the Moorish Kings (1870, Museé d’Orsay). Regnault’s image is, however, in the Orientalist tradition of painters like Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme rather than a depiction of a contemporary black person like Bazille’s woman arranging peonies.

Execution without Judgment under the Moorish Kings (1870), by Henri Regnault. Oil on canvas, 301 by 143 cm. Museé d’Orsay. (Wiki).

In 1871, when James Tissot left the turmoil of war-torn Paris for London, his American-born friend who lived there, James Whistler, famously painted his mother. In a 2018 article for BBC Culture, American poet and art critic Kelly Grovier wrote of Whistler’s “penchant for racist remarks and his fondness for slapping abolitionists in the face. The artist of course shouldn’t be tarred by the appalling allegiances of his brother, who wore the grey uniform of the Confederacy in its doomed efforts to perpetuate slavery, but the fact adds context. Whistler’s mother herself, who once tried to stop the black wife of her uncle and their children from acquiring family land, makes an ironic subject for a painting whose official title, on reflection, feels more than a little racially charged: Arrangement in Grey and Black.”

A reviewer for for James Abbott McNeill Whistler: A Life, by Gordon Fleming (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), wrote, “This withering biography knocks Whistler (1834-1903) off a pedestal. The man [was] a combative hothead given to fistfights, a racist who once punched a Haitian in the face simply because he was black.”

A 2001 review in the Hartford Courant of an exhibition of Whistler’s lithographs at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art begins with the curator’s observation, “James McNeill Whistler was not a nice man.” The reviewer comments, “Even though Whistler, a West Point dropout and native of Lowell, Mass., was safely out of the country, happily pursuing a bohemian life in Europe during the Civil War, he remained a stalwart supporter of the Confederate cause and remained a virulent racist throughout his life.”

It appears there are no images of people of color in Whistler’s work.

Courtyard of a House (New Orleans, a sketch), also known as Children on a Doorstep, 1872, by Edgar Degas. Oil on canvas, 60 by 73.5 cm. Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen, Denmark. (Wiki)

Tissot’s good friend Edgar Degas visited New Orleans during the Reconstruction period from late October 1872 to early March 1873; his Creole mother’s family, the Mussons, lived there, but another branch of the family that lived there was black, as discussed in a 1999 review in the New York Times of “Degas and New Orleans: A French Impressionist in America,” at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Degas’ maternal grandfather was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, of French parentage into the wealthy planter class and had made a fortune in Louisiana cotton. Degas’ mother died when he was thirteen, and he was visiting her younger brother, Michel Musson, who lived in a rented mansion and kept black servants. Edgar’s brother, René, had joined Michel’s cotton business and married one of his daughters, Estelle. The extended family lived together.

Art critic and scholar Christopher Benfey, author of Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), previously had “set the city astir by revealing that a branch of the Degas family in this city is descended from a black woman, Constance Vivant, who had six children with Vincent Rillieux, a brother of Degas’s maternal grandmother. One of the children, Norbert Rillieux, became a prominent engineer responsible for advances in sugar refining.” [The reviewer notes, “Neither the Rillieuxes nor the Mussons knew of each other before Mr. Benfey’s book.”]

The reviewer adds, “Mr. Benfey’s book went on to point out the membership of several of Degas’s close relatives here, including René, in the Crescent City White League, a fundamentally racist group bent on wresting political power from the more diverse (if no less corrupt) post-Civil War carpetbaggers…Degas himself wrote frequently in his letters home about black people observed in the street, black women taking care of white children. But with the exception of one partly obscured figure in one painting, he didn’t paint them.”

That painting is Courtyard of a House (New Orleans, a sketch), also known as Children on a Doorstep (Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen, Denmark), which depicts a black nurse watching children of varied skin tones in the large Musson household in the French Quarter in 1872. Degas’ letters from New Orleans to his friends in Paris discussing “the black world” use racist terminology (such as “quadroon” and “forests of ebony”). He notes of the racial mingling in this Southern city, “I shall be very surprised to live among white people only in Paris.”

In 1873, Degas painted A Cotton Office in New Orleans (Musée des beaux-arts de Pau, France), which portrays Michel Musson with his partners and others, including Degas’ brothers René and Achille. It was exhibited in the second Impressionist show in Paris in 1876 and was the first painting by an Impressionist to be purchased by a museum, the newly-founded Musée des beaux-arts de Pau, France, in 1878.

Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879), by Edgar Degas. Oil on canvas, 117.2 by 77.5 cm. National Gallery, London. (Wiki)

Miss Lala (1880) (Wiki)

Several years later, Degas painted a circus performer of mixed race, a petite twenty-one year old woman named Olga Brown, known as Miss La La, who had been born in Stettin (now in Poland) to a black father and a white mother.

She began performing at age 9, eventually touring circuses and music halls throughout Europe and also performing at London’s Royal Aquarium central hall and Manchester’s Gaiety Theatre. A 2007 article by Marilyn R. Brown reveals much more about her.

In January 1879, Degas attended several of this superstar’s aerial performances at the Cirque Fernando in Montmartre. Suspended from a rope clenched between her teeth, the exceptionally strong acrobat was raised seventy feet toward the circus’s domed ceiling. Degas made multiple studies, in graphic, pastel, and oil, of Miss La La and the circus building, and she visited his studio in the rue Fontaine, near the Cirque Fernando. In his diary, he referred to her as “my beautiful negress.” A pastel study at the Getty shows how he lightened the performer’s skin tone in the completed painting, which focuses on her dramatic feat. He identified her only by her stage name.

The painting was first shown at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1879.

Miss Lala at the Fernando Circus (1879), by Edgar Degas. Pastel on faded blue paper, 46.4 by 29.8 cm (18 1/4 by 11 3/4 in.) Getty Open Content.

An 1883 poster advertises Miss La La’s performances, twice a day, at the Hippodrome at the Pont de l’Alma, the setting of James Tissot’s painting of [white] performers in glittering costumes, Women of Paris: The Ladies of the Chariots, exhibited in Paris in 1885 and in London in 1886.

Tissot seems to have made friends easily and maintained numerous mutually satisfying relationships over many years – with both men and women, of varied ages, religions, sexual orientations, backgrounds, and temperaments. But there is no documentation on his views on race or any relationships he might have had with people of color, and in his paintings of groups that included soldiers, sailors, dock workers, and servants, all the figures are white.

Beating the Retreat in the Tuileries Gardens (1867), by James Tissot. Oil on panel. Private collection. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

But James Tissot made one image of a person of color: the Zouave drummer of the Imperial Guard who is the main figure in Beating the Retreat in the Tuileries Gardens (1867, private collection). In late 1854, Napoléon III ordered a special regiment, the Zouaves of the Imperial Guard, created from the Zouave regiments in the French Army. These Zouaves, by this time native Frenchmen stationed in Algeria, originally were members of the fierce Kabyli tribe of Zouaoua living in the rocky hills of Algeria and Morocco who had volunteered to fight with the French colonial army in 1830. Formed on March 15, 1855, the Zouaves of the Imperial Guard served through all the campaigns of the Second Empire, including the Franco-Austrian War of 1859 and the Mexican Intervention (1864-66). The Zouaves earned a reputation for reckless bravery, and they became famous for their distinctive uniforms, which included a short, collarless, open-fronted jacket, baggy trousers, sashes and Oriental head gear, modeled on Algerian native dress.

In this one picture, Tissot the Realist painter gives us a glimpse of a moment he engaged with a person of color, whom he clearly respected: he made a detailed, sensitive and fairly large oil study of the man, inscribed with his name and military unit, Jousef/Ben Moustapha/3ième Bataillon. Tissot exhibited the painting at the Salon in 1868, where it was purchased for 7,000 francs by the emperor’s cousin, Princess Mathilde.

© 2020 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

Related post:

The Company He Kept: James Tissot’s Friends

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.

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “Tissot’s wartime sketchbook, 1870-71,” in The Burlington Magazine (July 2020). The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2020/07/13/tissots-wartime-sketchbook-1870-71-in-the-burlington-magazine-july-2020/. <Date viewed>.

Grab a glass and your glasses – and let’s toast Tissot; I hope you’ll soon read my new article, “Tissot’s wartime sketchbook, 1870-71,” by Lucy Paquette. The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 162, No. 1408 (July 2020), pp. 560-569 (10 pages).

The article is free to read online through July 21, 2020 – just click here.

Some background to the article: James Tissot was at the height of his success by the Salon of 1870, where he exhibited Young Lady in a Boat (Jeune femme en bateau), lent by a Philadelphia millionaire living in Paris who had bought it for 3,300 francs and The Foursome (Partie carrée), a light-hearted and fully clothed eighteenth-century take on Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass  which brought him 8,000 francs from a dealer who sold it to the wife of a French banker. These were very high prices, reflecting the young painter’s renown.

Tissot had made it in Paris on his own from the time he was 19, and at 33, he evidently was content to live well, contribute wicked caricatures of world figures to a slightly subversive London Society magazine, Vanity Fair, and maintain a fairly low profile in the art world he had conquered within a decade of his arrival as a provincial art student.

In his new villa in the most fashionable avenue in Paris, his chic studio had quickly become a showcase for his renowned collection of Japanese art; it was a landmark to see when touring Paris – and, for Tissot, it was a brilliant marketing tool to attract commissions.

The Foursome (1870), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 47 by 56 in. (114.3 by 142.2 cm). National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. (Wiki)

These two paintings reflect Tissot’s carefree life in the early months of 1870, and I rediscovered a drawing by Tissot here in the U.S. – a surprising sketch that places him in Italy a month before Napoléon declared war on Prussia in July of that year.

How prepared was France for war?

Vanity Fair, Sept. 4, 1869: Sovereigns, No. 1 “Le regime parlementaire” (1869), by James Tissot. Color lithograph. Wove paper, 30.3 x 18.9 cm (11 15/16 x 7 7/16 in.) The Cleveland Museum of Art. Bequest of John Bonebrake 2014.254. Open Access.

Tissot began depicting this period in French history a year before it began, with the September 4, 1869 publication of his trenchant Vanity Fair political cartoon of a puny, weak and weary Napoléon III, ruler of “le régime parlementaire,” leaning on the supportive arm of Marianne, the symbol of republican France.

What role did James Tissot, a wealthy and successful young painter, play in the war?

Foyer of the Comédie-Française (Souvenir of the Siege of Paris) (1877), by James Tissot. Etching and drypoint on cream laid paper. Image: 14 15/16 x 10 13/16 in. (38 x 27.5 cm). Object 1977.7. Clark Art Institute. Williamstown, Massachusetts. Open Access.

In 1877, Tissot published an etching of a makeshift French hospital during the Franco-Prussian War: Foyer of the Comédie-Française. It was subtitled, Souvenir of the Siege of Paris.

But was this luxurious haven the reality of a wartime hospital? My research uncovered the fact that James Tissot became involved with a very different medical facility – days before he, unexpectedly, was sent to fight in the front line.

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

In 1876, Tissot published an etching called The First Killed I Saw. Who, exactly, was the first man that Tissot saw killed? Was it this soldier, who plummeted with his rifle from a lookout atop a rocky precipice?

And is it possible this young man was Edgar Degas’ friend, the sculptor, Joseph Cuvelier?

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

If you enjoy reading about the Impressionists and the Franco-Prussian War, you’ll find my article in The Burlington of interest.

Below, you’ll find several links to previous blog posts that provide additional context to this fascinating period.

James Tissot, known for his realistic, detailed depictions of women’s fashions, was equally adept at a completely different type of work. These drawings and watercolors, which were not exhibited during his lifetime, reveal more about an enigmatic man.

Enjoy The Burlington Magazine‘s offer of free online access through July 21!

My gratitude to Burlington Editor Michael Hall, Assistant Articles Editor Sarah Bolwell, and the layout and design team.

© 2020 by Lucy Paquette.  All rights reserved.

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

Related posts:

“Napoleon is an idiot”: Courbet & the Fall of the Second Empire, 1870

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

Courage & Cowardice: The Impressionists at War, 1870 (Part 1 of 2)

Courage & Cowardice: The Impressionists at War, 1870 (Part 2 of 2)

James Tissot and The Artists’ Brigade, 1870-71

Paris, June 1871

London, June 1871

The Artists’ Rifles, London

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.