James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love, and: Seductive Surfaces: The Art of Tissot (review)

In an 1869 review for L'Artiste, a painting of Young Ladies Looking at Japanese Objects prompted this astute, even prophetic observation: "Our industrial and artistic creations can perish, our morals and our fashions can fall into obscurity, but a picture by M. Tissot will be enough for archaeologists of the future to reconstitute our epoch" (qtd. in Marshall 44). For most readers, this comment will conjure up images of bored and beautiful women in fashionable costumes framed by elaborately decorated Victorian interiors. But an easy-to-read surface does not necessarily enable us to "reconstitute the epoch" (though it might help enormously with film production) and, indeed, the titles of the works under review here allude to a troubling discord between surface and depth in the works of the French-born painter James Tissot (1836-1902). As one Tissot scholar puts it: "We know that Tissot's seductive surfaces conceal hidden meanings, and that his costumes and attractive surfaces are a veneer" (Lochnan 77). In her introduction to Seductive Surfaces, Katharine Lochnan acknowledges that Tissot seems to leave nothing to the imagination in pictures loaded with detail, but contends that they are "ultimately troubling and impenetrable" (xi). For the organizers of the exhibit James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love, the "charm and glamour" of his surfaces tends to amplify rather than mute the "ambiguities and ironies" of his work. But as Nancy Rose Marshall demonstrates in her fine exhibition catalogue, the best evidence for reading against the grain is to be found in Victorian sources, which express unease, amusement, anger, distrust, and disgust when confronted with Tissot's "smooth and beautiful" surfaces.

Lochnan's contribution to Seductive Surfaces addresses one of the most enduring and hostile judgments of Tissot's paintings—John Ruskin's 1877 remark that "most of them are, unhappily, mere coloured photographs of vulgar society" (qtd. in Lochnan 1)—accepting its validity and making it the basis for a revaluation of Tissot's artistic program. Taking Tissot's "conversion" to contemporary subject matter (inspired by Charles Baudelaire's 1863 article for Le Figaro, "The Painter of Modern Life") as her starting point, Lochnan argues that Tissot's realism was subjective and ideological, elaborated through an acceptance of popular visual media such as fashion plates, caricatures, hand-colored photographs, photographic projection, reproductive engravings, chromolithographs, and oleographs. The techniques that located him between academic tradition and avant-garde experimentation were developed in order "to imitate the appearance of these 'vulgar' forms of printed imagery" (17). If for Lochnan these techniques make Tissot "aesthetically subversive," his oil paintings of social climbing nouveaux riches were "socially subversive," depending on a highly unstable form of irony in which he mocks the people to whom his works are visually most appealing. Seeing themselves in Tissot's hyper-realistic pictures of contemporary society, many viewers were compelled to ask, "Is he making fun of us?" Ruskin had defined vulgarity as "an undue regard to appearances and manners...and an assumption of behaviour, language, or dress, unsuited to them, by persons in inferior stations of life" (qtd. in Marshall 82). The showiness of Tissot's pictures often aroused the same kind of suspicion as ostentatious dress—namely, that the artist seemed to be engaging in some kind of pretense. Did he think he was representing fashionable society? Or was he satirizing the social pretensions of the upwardly mobile? The ambiguities surrounding class position are certainly the most provocative in his work, and much of the energy and persuasiveness of the pictures of Tissot's London period derive from their invocation of social mobility, fleeting legibility, and extreme self-consciousness.

Known for his superficial charm, Tissot yet recorded much that was not...