The popular and informative 19th century romance, literature, and history blogger, author Mimi Matthews, features a guest post from me this week, James Tissot’s Fashion Plates (1864-1878):  A Guest Post by Lucy Paquette.

Mimi’s posts, always so well-researched and entertaining, discuss numerous subjects relevant to the fashions that James Tissot painted in such stunning detail.  You can find them at 19th Century Fashion & Beauty, and they include:

Japonism: The Japanese Influence on Victorian Fashion

The 1860s in Fashionable Gowns: A Visual Guide to the Decade

The 1870s in Fashionable Gowns: A Visual Guide to the Decade

The 1880s in Fashionable Gowns: A Visual Guide to the Decade

The Trouble with Bustles: Victorian Fashion in the 19th Century News

The 19^th Century Wire Cage Crinoline

My guest post on Mimi’s blog is just one way to celebrate James Tissot’s 180th birthday on October 15, 2016.  I also will have the opportunity to visit two more of Tissot’s oil paintings that I have never seen close up.

I hope you will celebrate James Tissot’s life and work by reading my novel, THE HAMMOCK:  A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.*

THE HAMMOCK is the story of ten remarkable years in the life of James Tissot (1836 – 1902), who rebuilt – and then lost – his reputation in London.

By 1870, at age 34, he had become a multi-millionaire celebrity with an opulent new Parisian villa and studio among aristocratic neighbors near the Arc de Triomphe.  Handsome and charming, his friends included the painters James McNeill Whistler, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John Everett Millais.  When the Prussians attacked Paris that year, Tissot became a sharpshooter in the artists’ brigade defending the besieged capital.  After a bloody Communist rebellion, fought virtually at the doorstep of his mansion, he fled to London.

Amid suspicions that he was a Communist, he quickly rebuilt his brilliant career among the Industrial Age’s nouveaux riches.  In 1876, Tissot took a young Irish divorcée as his mistress and muse.  He referred to her only as “La Mystérieuse” and withdrew from Society to paint her in his garden paradise in the suburbs.  Within three years, his pictures had pushed the boundaries of Victorian morality, and the British art establishment turned against him.  In a debacle of friendship, fame and loss, his artistic heyday of painting a decade of glamour and leisure in London came to an end.  Celebrated during his lifetime, Tissot has been nearly forgotten by all but art historians.

THE HAMMOCK is a psychological portrait, exploring the forces that unwound the career of this complex man.  Based on contemporary sources, the novel brings Tissot’s world 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  

ISBN:  978-0-615-68267-9 (ePub)

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

View Lucy Paquette’s videos:

“The Strange Career of James Tissot”  (2:33 min.)

“Louise Jopling and James Tissot”  (2:42 min.)

Take Lucy Paquette’s BuzzFeed Personality Quiz,

Which Female Victorian Artist Are You?

*Don’t own a Kindle?  Amazon.com has free Kindle reading apps!