Like his friend Edgar Degas, the French painter James Tissot (1836–1902) was an avid Anglophile. In the 1870s he lived and worked in London and painted the manners, fashions, and vanities of modern Britain with the most refined sense of humor. In his scenes from high society, fascinating in their powerful undercurrents of sexual drama, he smiles at his characters’ foibles while reveling in every detail of their finery, every sign of their savoir-faire.
The first Tissot retrospective to be held in the US since 1968, this exhibition included approximately forty paintings, forty etchings and mezzotints, and fourteen biblical illustrations in gouache. All phases of Tissot’s career were covered: the historical costume pieces of his early years; his first, highly successful ventures into the painting of modern life and love in Paris; his move to London; his studies of the beautiful Kathleen Newton, his beloved mistress and, for a time, chief model; his eventual withdrawal into the closed intimate world of their own home and garden; his return to Paris following Newton’s death from consumption; the religious fervor of his last years and his great illustrated Bible.
Venues
Yale Center for British Art: September 22–November 28, 1999
Musée du Quebec, Québec City: December 15, 1999–March 12, 2000
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo: March 24–July 2, 2000
Credits
James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love was co-organized by the Center and the American Federation of Arts (AFA), with support from the AFA’s Benefactors Circle and an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. It was curated by Malcolm Warner (Yale Center for British Art) in conjunction with Nancy Marshall (Yale) and accompanied by a catalogue that Warner and Marshall co-authored.
Top image
James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love installation, photo by Richard Caspole
Extended reading
James Tissot: Victorian Life, Modern Love
Edited by Nancy Rose Marshall