Champagne in the Shrubbery: Sex, Science, and Space in James Tissot’s London Conservatory

French artist James Tissot moved to London in 1871; soon after his arrival, he set up house in fashionable St. John’s Wood, where his luxurious studio and conservatory became the talk of the town. Tissot’s representations of this space reveal that the Victorian plant conservatory was a particularly complex site wherein contemporary ideas—and, more often, anxieties—about the intersections among sex, race, health, science, and empire came into contact in complicated and often contradictory ways, particularly in the context of late nineteenth-century understandings of climatology.