Reflections: Summer In The Garden At Grove End Road

Medium: Oil On Canvas
Size: 76 x 51 cm (29.9 x 20.1 in)
Signed: Signed (indistinctly on the edge of the pond, lower center left): JJames Tissot; and inscribed: à Madame R(K?)auli

Painted circa 1880

The setting of this painting is immediately recognizable. The ornamental garden pond, the broken colonnade,[1] the conservatory, and the back of the house on Grove End Road [2] with its abutting carefully ordered rows of flowers, all appear in paintings by Tissot from the second half of the 1870s. Here we see two elegantly attired young women, their reflections shimmering in the pond, one lying in the grass, wearing a straw hat trimmed with flowers, the other looking straight at the viewer, shaded from the brilliant sun by a parasol.

Although we cannot be certain, the standing figure is probably the pervasive Kathleen Newton,[3] the recumbent lady likely Mrs Newton’s sister, Mary Hervey, who lived with her husband, a Colonel retired from the Indian Army, in nearby Hill Road. In her immediate engagement with the viewer, the Mrs Newton’s pose resembles the female figures in A Convalescent, of 1878 (City of Manchester Art Galleries), Spring (also of 1878), and Orphan (of 1879, in which the figure wears the same shawl, Private Collection). Mrs Newton’s hat with its blue ribbon first appears in his shipboard paintings of 1873, The Captain’s Daughter (Southampton City Art Gallery), Boarding the Yacht (formerly Lord Samuel collection), the Captain and the Mate (Private Collection) and The Return from the Boating Trip (Private Collection).[4] Both this hat and the cream parasol can be seen in A Spring Morning (Matinée à printemps), which can be dated to 1875 by Tissot’s drypoint etching of the same title.[5] What is almost certainly the same hat can be seen in Holyday (The Picnic), of 1876 (London, the Tate Gallery), although the identity of the sitter is unknown.[6] Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, who did not know this work, has particularly noted Tissot’s practice of reusing the same costumes again and again for his models.[7] The artist obviously took great care in carefully staging these scenes, casting his characters and choosing their costumes from his wardrobe of elaborate dresses and fabrics.

The artist seems to have deliberately left the painting slightly unresolved and has not attempted the high finish which characterized his publicly exhibited works. In this it resembles the exquisite (but slightly tighter) small panel from 1881, En plein soleil (Private collection, London). In this quality it resembles the exquisite (but slightly tighter) small panel from 1881, En plein soleil (Private collection, London). The bolder handling, thicker paint, extensive use of whites and stark contrasts of light and shade, can be found in relatively few works, even of this date.

Tissot has deliberately divided the upper two-thirds of his canvas from the lower third with the curved stone edge of the pool that was the central decorative feature of his garden. This has enabled the artist to contrast the more carefully drawn figures with their shimmering reflections and thus balance the otherwise top-heavy composition. Aside from A Spring Morning (1875), which has been remarked upon elsewhere for the influence of Japanese art on the composition, this is the only work in which Tissot has shown his subjects’ reflections in the foreground. In the latter composition the water and the reflection are insignificant elements. In our painting, however, the pool is a major feature of the composition. The artist has used the water to trick the viewer, by showing the reflection of the two figures perfectly proportioned (if the painting is turned upside down, they appear to be standing or lying in a boat), while telescoping the reflection of the more distant house, permitting us to see part of the roof that is actually out of view in the upper portion of the painting.

The movement in the surface of the water allows Tissot to free his style and brushwork from the usual constraints of his academic training, and it would seem likely that the artist himself reversed the canvas when painting these reflected figures. Tissot also allows us to speculate whether, when painting this scene, he was himself seated in a boat, as the foreground water appears to be almost lapping at his feet, although the geography of the garden (not known to the viewer) would make that impossible. The water is contained on three sides only by the edges of the painting and, if we reverse the canvas and consider only the third separated by the stone wall, we see what could be an independent work, or freely handled sketch.

In both technique and style we may note a debt to Giuseppe de Nittis, a friend of Degas with whom Tissot was well-acquainted, and while the composition is characteristic of Tissot, there is a deliberate lack of the restraint which had previously set him apart from his French friends, Manet and Degas. Indeed this work is more French in tone than the paintings Tissot exhibited in London and demonstrates a painterly facility that his more “Victorian” works lack.

Tissot must have retained this painting (along with several dozen others) until his return to Paris; it is dedicated to a mysterious “Madame R(K?)auli” and is signed with the signature Tissot used for his personal correspondence and other similar dedications, rather than the ornately stylized JJTissot that he used for exhibited works. Michael Wentworth,[8] who has examined the painting at first-hand, concurs with the dating and has proposed that it would have been among the works that Tissot gave to French patrons following his return to France.

1. Made of cast iron, the rounded columns were painted black and terminated with square columns at either end; this colonnade ran from the south side of the pool towards the house. A similar curved colonnade ran from the east end of the pool, and reproduced one in the Parc Monceau, Paris
2. Number 14, now number 44 (with a reduced garden). This house was acquired by (Sir) Lawrence Alma-Tadema after Tissot’s departure for Paris in 1882.
3. Compare the oval face, the rather heavy eyelids, wide apart eyes and the distinctive mouth in the portrait in July: Specimen of a Portrait (circa 1878, Cleveland Museum of Art), A Winter’s Walk (etching from 1880), and The Elder Sister (1881, etching and painting, based on a photograph by the artist).
4. The figure of the young woman in these four paintings has been identified as Margaret Freebody, née Kennedy, the wife of John Freebody, a sea captain whom Tissot befriended in London (See James Tissot, Monograph produced in conjunction with the Tissot Exhibition at the Barbican and the Musée du Petit Palais, 15 Nov 1984 – 16 March 1985, with a preliminary catalogue raisonné, edited by Krystyna Matyjaskiewicz, p.109, under catalogue number 55). Despite wearing the same hat, she is distinctly different in appearance to the sitter in our painting, whom we have identified as Mrs Newton.
5. See James Tissot, 1984-85, op. cit., “London Years: the Dissemination of the Image”, by Harley Preston, p. 57, fig. 23 and 24. See also the etching, Woman at the Window, of 1875, in which the figure is dressed identically to that in Spring Morning.
6. The group in this painting were described by Oscar Wilde as ‘over dressed, common-looking people’. See James Tissot, 1984-85, op. cit., p. 117, number 96.
7. See James Tissot, 1984-85, op. cit., “Costume in Tissot’s Pictures,” by Krystyna Matyjaskiewicz, pp. 64-77. It would seem that both the hat and parasol were among the many other hats, bonnets, dresses and shawls with which Tissot adorned his models throughout his London sojourn.
8. Author of what remains the most important study of the artist, James Tissot, Oxford, 1984.