James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love (review)

Marshall, Nancy Rose, and Malcolm Warner. James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love. Exh. cat. The American Federation of Arts and Yale Center for British Art (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999). Pp. 207. ISBN 0-300-08173-1 (cloth); 0-939606-89-2 (paper)

Between the fall of the Commune in 1871 and the death, in 1882, of his lover and favorite model, Kathleen Newton, the anglophile French painter, James (born Jacques-Joseph) Tissot lived in London. There he painted a series of fetching modern-life genre pieces that brilliantly capture the social interactions and leisured pleasures of well groomed Britons. The groundwork of Tissot study having been established by the monograph of Michael Wentworth (1984) and by Nancy Rose Marshall's Yale dissertation on the London paintings (1998), the handsome and thoughtful publication by Marshall and Warner is a welcome contribution to the literature on this artist, whose work shares features with, yet stands apart from, the art of his friends Degas and Whistler. The catalogue for a crowd-pleasing exhibition (Yale Center for British Art, the Musée du Québec, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love was published in the same year as the collection of essays edited by Katharine Lochnan, Seductive Surfaces: The Art of Tissot (Yale UP).

It was, appropriately, seated before a portrait by Lucas Cranach that Degas portrayed Tissot (Metropolitan Museum of Art). There is a minute, descriptive particularity in Tissot's art that recalls both northern Renaissance handling and its revival by the mid-nineteenth century Belgian painter Hendrik Leys, whose painstaking historical costume pieces Tissot admired on a trip to Antwerp. The nostalgic work of Leys complemented Tissot's exposure to early Renaissance linear purity and to Byzantine hieratic composition in the Louvre studio of Ingres pupil Hippolyte Flandrin and that of a student of Ingres and Flandrin, Louis Lamothe (who also instructed Degas). Notwithstanding this formation, it is pointed immediacy - rather than retrospection - that characterizes Tissot's art. This collector of japonaiserie composed in flat, asymmetrical patterns and aggressively placed the viewer within spaces as obliquely viewed as those represented by Degas, Cassatt, and Caillebotte.

As a Frenchman drawn to the commercial potential of scenes from modern London life, Tissot can be compared to Gustave Doré, whose illustrations to London, A Pilgrimage were published in 1872. Yet, in contrast to the suffocating over-population of Doré's London, Tissot often concentrates our attention on two or three figures amid a profusion of well-tailored fabric, which recalls that this son of a linen draper and a milliner came from the textile center, Nantes.

Following Tissot's rebirth as a religious artist in 1885 (when, while sketching in Saint-Sulpice during mass, he had a vision of Christ), this rigorously mimetic artist sought reconciliation of Christian faith and scientific truth. As in the scriptural paintings of the Catholic Horace Vernet and the Protestant William Holman Hunt, Tissot brought his faith to bear on a thoroughly nineteenth-century insistence on life's material trappings. His prodigious outpouring of religious images includes the 365 gouache and watercolor paintings and pen drawings comprising The Life of Christ, which, thoroughly researched in the Holy Land, were reproduced in France and in England following the exhibition, to great acclaim, of 270 of the sheets at the Salon du Champs du Mars (1894). In this phase of Tissot's career - regarding which, I recommend the essay by Gert Schiff in the exhibition catalogue, J. James Tissot: Biblical Paintings (New York: Jewish Museum, 1982) - the secular and the sacred phases of the artist's career sometimes converge with surprising results. In What our Saviour Saw from the Cross (Marshall and Warner, no. 83) - a vertiginous view of the spectators at the Crucifixion - Christ's bleeding feet appear at the center of the bottom frame, the remainder of the body as abruptly cropped as that of a Parisian...