James Jacques Joseph Tissot (15 October 1836 - 8 August 1902) was a French
painterPainting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, who spent much of his career in Britain.
Biography
Tissot was born in
NantesNantes is a city in western France, located on the Loire River, from the Atlantic coast. The city is the 6th largest in France, while its metropolitan area ranks 8th with over 800,000 inhabitants....
, France. In about 1856, he began study at the
École des Beaux-ArtsÉcole des Beaux-Arts refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The most famous is the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years,...
in
ParisParis is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
under Hippolyte Flandrin and
LamotheLouis Lamothe was a French academic artist born in Lyons. He is remembered today primarily as the teacher of several more renowned artists, notably Edgar Degas, Elie Delaunay, Henry Lerolle, Henri Regnault, and James Tissot....
, and became friendly with
Edgar DegasEdgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...
and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Tissot exhibited in the
Paris SalonThe Salon , or rarely Paris Salon , beginning in 1725 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Between 1748–1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the Western world...
for the first time in 1859, two portraits of women and three scenes in medieval dress from
Faust. The latter show the influence of the Belgian painter Henri Leys (
Jan August Hendrik LeysJan August Hendrik, Baron Leys , also known as Henri Leys, was a Belgian painter and printmaker.Henri Leys was born and died in Antwerp. He studied with Mathieu Ignace Van Brée at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp and then with his brother-in-law Ferdinand De Braekeleer...
), whom he had met in Antwerp in 1859. In the mid-1860s, however, Tissot began to concentrate on depicting women, often although not always shown in modern dress. Like contemporaries such as
Alfred StevensAlfred Émile Léopold Stevens was a Belgian painter.Alfred Stevens was born in Brussels. He came from a family involved with the visual arts: his older brother Joseph and his son Léopold were painters, while another brother Arthur was an art dealer and critic...
and
Claude MonetClaude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...
, Tissot also explored
japonisme, including Japanese objects and costumes in his pictures. A portrait of Tissot by Degas from these years (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) shows him with a Japanese screen hanging on the wall.
Tissot fought in the
Franco-Prussian WarThe Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the 1870 War was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia was aided by the North German Confederation, of which it was a member, and the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and...
and then in defense of the
Paris CommuneThe Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...
. Either because of the political associations caused by the latter, or simply because of better opportunities, he left Paris for London in 1871. Having already worked as a caricaturist for Thomas Gibson Bowles, the owner of the magazine
Vanity Fair, as well as exhibited at the Royal Academy, Tissot arrived with established social and artistic connections in London. He quickly developed his reputation as a painter of elegantly dressed women shown in scenes of fashionable life. In 1874, Degas asked him to join them in the first exhibition organized by the artists we call the Impressionists, but Tissot refused. He continued to be close to the artists however.
Berthe MorisotBerthe Morisot was a painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. She was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.In 1864, she exhibited for the first...
visited him in London in 1874 and he traveled to Venice with
Edouard ManetÉdouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
at about the same time. He also saw Whistler regularly. In 1875-6, Tissot met an Irish divorcee named Mrs.
Kathleen NewtonKathleen Newton was the Irish mistress and muse of French artist James Jacques Tissot.- Early life :Kathleen Irene Ashburnham Kelly was descended from an Irish Catholic medical family and raised in Lahore and Agra, in India...
, who became the painter's companion and frequent model. She moved into Tissot's household in St. John's Wood, London, in 1876 and stayed there until her death in the late stages of
consumptionTuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
in 1882.
After Kathleen Newton's death, Tissot returned to Paris. A major exhibition of his work took place in 1885 at the Galerie Sedelmeyer, where he showed 15 large paintings in a series called
La Femme à Paris. Unlike the genre scenes of fashionable women he painted in London, these paintings represent different types and classes of women, shown in their professional and social contexts. The works suggest the influence of Japanese prints in their use of unexpected angles and framing.
During the mid-1880s, Tissot experienced a religious revelation which led him to spend the rest of his life illustrating the Bible. He traveled to the Middle East in 1886, 1889, and 1896 to make studies of the landscape and people. His series of 365 gouache illustrations showing the life of Christ were shown to critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences in Paris (1894-5), London (1896) and New York (1898-9), before being bought by the Brooklyn Museum in 1900. They were published in a French edition in 1896–7 and in an English one in 1897-8. Tissot spent the last years of his life working on paintings of subjects from the Old Testament (Jewish Museum, New York). Although he never completed the series, he exhibited 80 of them in Paris in 1901 and engravings after them were published in 1904. Tissot died in Doubs, France in 1902, while living in the Château de Buillon, which he had inherited from his father in 1888.
Gallery
External links