JAMES JACQUES JOSEPH TISSOT
Nancy 1836 - Buillon 1902
Although French born, James (Jacques Joseph) Tissot is remembered today as the leading painter of English Victorian society, and while he produced major works both before and after his London sojourn, it was at his studio in St John’s Wood that his finest paintings were produced. His family origins were in a sense emblematic of his own aspirations, as he moved from the obscurity of a provincial city to become a leading figure in the artistic world of Paris and London. Originally from the minor provincial nobility, already holding office in the 15th century, the Tissot family was for centuries of insufficient estate or ambition to move beyond the confines of the villages of Trevillars and Mèche in the Franche-Comté, close to the Swiss border. Tissot’s father, however, determined to improve himself, moved to the opposite extreme of France, to Nantes, where he established a profitable business as a linen draper. The artist’s mother, deeply religious and from a staunchly royalist family, also made her way in trade, with a successful millinery business supplying the wives of the leading citizens of the city. So successful was Tissot père that he was able to buy the Château de Buillion in the Doubs, where Tissot died at the age of sixty-six. Brought up in a household in which fashion and fabrics were the source of pleasure and wealth, it is hardly surprising that Tissot became such a master of their reproduction in paint. At the same time his childhood in Nantes, a busy port made wealthy by international trade, may well-explain his interest in subjects set in the much greater port of London. Tissot began his career, like so many of his contemporaries, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he was a fellow student and soon fast-friend of the young Edgar Degas, who like him was also enrolled as a pupil of Louis Lamothe. The two painters came from similar prosperous and conservative upper-middle class backgrounds and remained friends for decades; indeed, one of Degas’ finest portraits is of Tissot at His Easel, circa 1868 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art). After first producing historicized works, much influenced by the Belgian painter Hendrik Leys, by the mid-1860s he was beginning to enjoy increasing success as a portraitist. At the same time he became friendly with Manet (with whom he traveled to Venice in the mid-1870s, remaining on close terms until the latter’s death), whose Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe 1863 (Paris, Orsay) and Woman in a Garden of 1866-67 (Paris, Orsay) were typical of the paintings that influenced Tissot’s development and choice of subjects. He also made the acquaintance of Alfred Stevens, an older and immensely successful Belgian born artist, who had befriended several of the younger generation of painters, including Monet, to whom Stevens introduced Japanese art. Stevens had made his name as a painter of elegant society women, gathered together in ornate interiors where they pursued their leisured and refined lives. Tissot was able to transform this genre to his own particular style and in London, making it his own, achieve wealth and position comparable to that enjoyed by Stevens in Paris. Japonisme was to exert a continuing fascination for Tissot, and his appointment as drawing master to Prince Akitake Kotugawa in 1868 allowed him to expand his collection as well as his knowledge of Japanese art. With the disastrous defeat of the French forces in the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of the Empire, Tissot served with the National Guard in the Defense of Paris. Following the suppression of the Commune, he left for England, where he remained for the next eleven years (while retaining his Paris house, to which he later returned). The reason for his move is uncertain, but the chaos following the end of the war was an unprofitable environment for an ambitious artist. Furthermore, Tissot’s great friend Whistler (whose name James, Tissot had adopted in a spirit of anglophilia, in place of his given name, Jacques), had established himself in London with considerable success. Tissot found a substantial villa in St John's Wood where he both lived and worked; the kind of bourgeois residence occupied by so many of his subjects. As a caricaturist for Vanity Fair, Tissot met London's social elite and, as earlier in France, was at first in demand as a fashionable portrait painter, much admired for his facility in rendering the silks and satins of the elegantly dressed women who patronized him. Portraits soon came to be a less significant aspect of his art as he instead turned to chronicling the lives of the upper-middle classes, at home and in society, to which he proved particularly adept – fitting himself effortlessly into the lives of his subjects. Once settled in London Tissot resolved to be accepted by society, and in 1872 made his debut at the Royal Academy. Nonetheless he never enjoyed close relationships with the leading British painters, and in 1877 he broke with his friend Whistler, who could not forgive Tissot for failing to come to his aid in his libel suit with Ruskin. His house was a place where successive French artists and critics visiting London felt obliged to call; his visitors included Berthe Morisot and Edmond de Goncourt [1] who commented on his establishment in their letters. Tissot’s life was transformed by his meeting with Kathleen Newton, the divorced wife of an unfortunate Captain in the Indian Army, who shortly after the marriage had found his young wife already enjoying a close romantic relationship with a fellow officer. Although her two children bore the name Newton, the elder was certainly the child of her lover, Captain Palliser, while the younger, George, born in March 1876, may well have been fathered by Tissot. While we find no mention in Tissot’s life of Mrs Newton before she moved into his house in mid-1876, they must have already begun their romantic involvement by mid-1875. The nature of their relationship was known to just and handful of their intimates, only Helleu among Tissot’s friends having actually met her and that by accident. Those who were ignorant of her role in his life may have wondered at her constant presence in so many of the paintings he produced between 1876 and 1882. Perhaps it was no coincidence that in 1876 Tissot transferred his allegiance from the great rooms of the Royal Academy to the more intimate and ornate show rooms of the private Grosvenor Gallery. The tragedy of Kathleen Newton’s gradual decline from tuberculosis (the killer of so many romantic heroines) was tenderly recorded by Tissot until the very end, in a series of small paintings, and continued to preoccupy him for at least a decade after her death. When she died, on 9th November 1882, he was prostrated with grief, and draping her coffin with purple velvet he prayed for hours; immediately following her burial, he abandoned his house (which was sold to Lawrence Alma Tadema) and returned to Paris to resume his career. Back in France Tissot found himself forgotten by all but his friends, and quickly sought to re-establish his reputation. He organized a large retrospective at the Palais de l’Industrie and had particular success with a group of pastels, leading him to use this medium far more extensively, particularly for the society portraits for which he was soon in demand. He also produced a series of large-scale works, Les Femmes à Paris, recording different aspects of Parisian life in the haut and demi-monde, which he straddled in his own private life. His choice of Les Femmes à Paris as a title for his artistic enterprise seems to have been particularly apposite since, despite the tragic loss of Mrs Newton that continued to haunt him, he, Boldini, Forain and Helleu (fellow painters with whom he shared much in common), seem to have indulged their passions for the opposite sex to the full during this period. Tissot was still faithful to the strong religious beliefs inculcated by his mother, however, attending Mass daily, and the culmination of his career was a series of illustrations of the Old and New Testaments. 1. In 1874 Edmond de Goncourt wrote sarcastically that Tissot had “a studio with a waiting room where, at all times, there was iced champagne at the disposal of visitors, and around the studio, a garden where, all day long, one can see a footman in silk stockings brushing and shining the shrubbery leaves.”
