James Tissot
French, 1836-1902 (active England)
The Thames (La Tamise), 1876
etching and drypoint, sixteenth (final) state
9 x 14 1/4 in.
SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by the SBMA Women's Board in honor of the Museum's 60th Anniversary
2000.48.12
An early self portrait of Tissot as a young man from 1865.
“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.” - L’Artiste, 1869
James Tissot - The Thames, ca. 1876, oil on canvas
COMMENTS
Etching, in the same direction, after a painting of the same English title, exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1876, no. 113, together with the print after it, no. 1156.
"La Tamise" makes use of a composition Tissot employed for a number of nautical pictures. This view of a boat cut horizontally appears for the first time in the late 1860s in "Jeune femme en bateau", where it creates a tension between surface pattern and spatial recession in a manner obviously learned from Japanese prints. It is a device favored by a number of Tissot’s contemporaries, who employed it in a far more radical way, as is seen in similar subjects by Manet. Tissot’s "La Tamise" is some years earlier, and more conservative, but it is also tied more closely to narrative, and purely compositional requirements are diluted by genre. There is, however, a subtle balance between the two, each reinforcing the other.
The comic possibilities of rivalry and choice in affairs of the heart run as an iconographic thread through Tissot’s pictures in the early 1870s. In the pictures of the late 1860s, a series of Directoire costume paintings, sexual innuendo was an essential part of the narrative. In England, the romantic rivalries of eighteenth-century comedy had been added to costume pictures of Neo-Georgian dress; later the theme was freed of costume and put in modern dress, as in "La Tamise", with great success.
It was a theme common enough in English painting, but Tissot’s handling of it was usually criticized for its impropriety. In truth, a remarkable double entendre exists in his paintings: there is a sharp tension between an apparent superficial innocence of subject and a salacious possibility that lurks beneath the decorous surface? In combination with Tissot’s unvarnished modernity of subject, this double entendre created a general sense of uneasiness.
- Michael Wentworth, James Tissot: Catalogue Raisonné of his Prints, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1978, p. 98
Clearly by 1875 Tissot was an accepted and well-known figure in social circles. In 1876, however, two events occurred which were to change the course of his English career. The first was the hostile reception of one of his pictures at the Royal Academy. At the 1876 Academy he exhibited two etchings and two pictures. The first picture, "A Convalescent", has already been mentioned. The second, which caused so much offense, was "The Thames", showing a jaunty naval oflicer accompanying two smartly dressed ladies on a boat trip round the Pool of London. Tissot had already explored the theme of a sailor and two ladies in "Boarding the Yacht" of 1873, which had not given offense. "The Thames", however, seemed to strike Victorian morality on a very raw nerve, and the reaction of the critics was violent. The "Athenaeum" thought it ‘thoroughly and wilfully vulgar’ and described the two ladies as ‘ugly and low-bred’; the "Spectator" went further, accusing them of being ‘undeniably Parisian ladies’, obviously in Victorian terms the worst thing you could possibly say about a lady. ‘Questionable material’, thundered "The Times". Even the "Graphic", normally a strong supporter of Tissot, complained that it was ‘More French, shall we say, than English?’ Tissot was probably amazed by the critics’ reaction. But J. C. Horsley had encountered just the same problem in 1860 when he had exhibited "Showing a Preference", with a naval officer accompanying two pretty girls through a cornfield; and even earlier, in 1854, a storm of abuse greeted Abraham Solomon’s picture "First Class — The Meeting", showing a young man chatting to a pretty girl in a railway carriage while her father slumbers. Solomon even went to the lengths of painting a second, more acceptable, version. By the same token, the Victorian audience clearly found Tissot’s picture vulgar, improper and, even worse, French. Anti-French feeling is often detectable in criticisms of Tissot’s pictures, and never more so than with the luckless "Thames". It certainly warns us against falling into the trap of imagining that Tissot is the perfect mirror of Victorian society: to his contemporaries his pictures were clearly exotic, flashy and satirical, and his characters were simply too smart to be respectable. Tissot continued nevertheless to paint pictures on the same theme as "The Thames". A very similar picture entitled "Portsmouth Dockyard" shows a Highlander in a boat with two pretty girls, and at about the same time, c. 1877, he painted "The Gallery of H.M.S. Calcutta", again showing a naval officer on board ship with two attractive ladies. But the débacle of "The Thames" marked the effective end of Tissot’s relationship with the Royal Academy. Except for two pictures in 1881, his last year in London, he did not exhibit there again, and transferred his affections to the newer and more advanced Grosvenor Gallery, which opened in 1877.
- Christopher Wood, "Tissot", Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1986, p.83
Biography
Jacques-Joseph Tissot was born in 1836, in Nantes in a seaport on the French coast. Throughout his life Tissot retained an affinity and fascination with all things nautical, and his marked ability to accurately paint rigging and shipboard scene paintings must have come from his boyhood. Tissot was the son of a very prosperous, successful shopkeeper, who was a devout Roman Catholic. Unsurprisingly the young Tissot was sent away to a boarding school run by Jesuits. Tissot senior seems to have been unenthusiastic about the prospect of his son becoming an artist, but eventually accepted the inevitability of his son's artistic pretensions forming the basis of his career.
In 1856 Tissot went to Paris to train as a painter. Here, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts the young Tissot met the young James McNiell Whistler (1834-1903), one of the most celebrated and unusual figures in 19th century art. At about this time Tissot also met, and became a friend of Degas (1834-1917) the Impressionist painter. Like Alma-Tadema, and Edward Burne-Jones, Tissot changed his name at this time to draw attention to himself. In his case he anglicized his Christian name to James. Tissot had fully inherited the shrewd commercial instincts of his father, and again like Alma-Tadema and Millais was a painter-entrepreneur. In the 1860s the painter became something of a traveler, visiting Italy, and in 1862 London. In 1864 Tissot exhibited his oil paintings at the Royal Academy for the first time, suggesting that he realized the potential of London as a source of wealthy patrons. Tissot began to concentrate on contemporary scene paintings at this time. In 1869 he produced caricatures for Vanity Fair magazine, where "Spy" had been the celebrated producer of this type of work for many years. Tissot produced a brilliant caricature of the elegant, sophisticated Frederic Leighton at an evening reception.
In 1870 the Franco-Prussian war broke out. Following the defeat of France, and the occupation of Paris, Tissot originally lingered in the capital. In 1871, however, Tissot fled to England where he had a considerable number of contacts. Tissot was initially the guest of the Editor of Vanity Fair, with whom he had become friendly, and who seems to have opened doors for him both socially and professionally. Tissot, hard working and shrewd, quickly became successful in London, where his oil paintings of social events and his conversation pieces rapidly became popular. These paintings look beautifully painted, and an interesting record of social life at the time, but were controversial. This was the time when commercially successful people were overtaking the landed aristocracy in wealth, and, as patrons of the arts. This situation was not to the liking of everybody, and in some quarters Tissot paintings were regarded as depictions of the nouveau-riche. Ruskin was a particularly severe critic, describing the Tissot paintings as "mere painted photographs of vulgar society." In 1873, the painter bought the house in St John's Wood where he was to live for the rest of his time in London, and he himself started to become a significant figure socially. Tissot's success in London was regarded with envy by Degas and other painters of his circle in Paris.
In the mid 1870s Tissot met Kathleen Newton (1854-1882), an Irish divorcee with a distinctly colorful past. She had formed a sexual relationship with a man on a voyage to India to be married, and born his child. Kathleen became his model, muse, mistress, and the great love of his life. Tissot's paintings of his lady tell any observer of sensitivity of his love for her. Many other successful men kept mistresses in St John's Wood, but they did not, like Tissot, live openly with them in adulterous relationships. This situation forced the painter to chose between his social life and Kathleen. To his credit he chose his lady. It would be wrong to think that Tissot became something of a hermit, as he and Kathleen Newton entertained their more bohemian artistic friends at home. But Tissot's days as a man-about-town were over, and he and Kathleen seem to have settled into a quiet life of domesticity. Kathleen's two children lived close by with her sister. Kathleen Newton was an extremely attractive young woman, and appeared in many of Tissot's paintings at this time. In the late 1870s her health started to decline, with the onset of that great 19th century killer Tuberculosis. Tissot remained devoted to her. It is likely that the Roman Catholicism of both painters would not allow them to contemplate marriage. In 1882, the desperately ill Kathleen cheated consumption by committing suicide, and, as a result was not able to be buried in consecrated ground. Within one week Tissot left his home at St Johns Wood, and never returned to it. The house was later bought by Alma-Tadema.
Tissot was devastated by his loss, and never really recovered from it. Tissot seemed unable to accept the enormity and permanence of it. It is rumored that he considered marriage to other women later in life, but these affairs came to nothing. Like many English people at this time Tissot became interested in Spiritualism, and on a number of occasions tried to contact the dead Kathleen. The exotic French artist and his fallen women - one of the great 19th century English love stories. Initially Tissot carried on working back in Paris, in much the same manner as in London. Tissot produced a series of paintings of attractive, beautifully dressed women in sumptuous surroundings. These paintings were, for a time, extremely fashionable. Following this Tissot experienced a profound religious experience, and became increasingly devout. Tissot embarked on a series of religious paintings, visiting the Middle East on a number of occasions, to observe and paint backgrounds for his oil paintings. These paintings were well-received at the time, but in our more secular age have little appeal. James Tissot at Buillon died on Friday 8th August 1902
https://www.jamestissot.org/biography.html
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
In "The Thames" series - all twelve states on view in this room - Tissot's artistic process is made visible through the changes he made to the etching plate as he produced this composition depicting three figures afloat on the river Thames. Tissot first etched the figures, gradually adding to the background and amplifying features, such as a net basket and bottles of wine in the foreground. A painter and printmaker, Tissot decided to make prints as a "lucrative sideline to his painting." More etchings could be quickly printed and distributed, marketing his artistic skill. "The Thames" series has been compared to photography, in its serialism; one author has even aligned the series with Eadweard Muybridge's animated photographs. What the series does show is the crosscurrent between the two media in the late 19th-century, as artists experimented with multiple modes of creative expression.
- Copper Plate to Collotype, 2023