}
James Tissot - The Letter
By Robert Amos
As a child I was occasionally taken to the Art Gallery of Ontario. Most
of the experience is a blur to me now, but one painting fascinated me
then and has left a lasting impression. La Demoiselle de Magasin
(1883-5) shows the shop girl standing inside the show window of a
millinery shop. The perfection of the painting - her dress, the fancy
ribbons for sale, reflections in the glass, and the busy world going on
outside - seemed miraculous to me. The painter was James Tissot.
Since then I have learned that there is more to art than a fine finish
and a pretty face. But painting remains more visual magic than theory,
and I have continued to admire Tissot. At the moment one of his fine
canvases is on show in Victoria.
The Letter by James Tissot
The Letter shows a meticulously painted Dutch-style garden in London.
An atmosphere of melancholy pervades the scene. The season is autumn,
the light is lowering, and the horse-chestnuts are shedding their
yellow leaves as we look on. At the right side a conservatory lets onto
a patio where a servant - a footman in silk stockings - is clearing
away the dishes from a tea party. He steals a glance at the woman
standing in the garden nearby.
The woman is dressed in sombre tones, almost mourning. She pays no
notice to the servant, for she is lost in her own none-too-happy
thoughts. She holds a letter in her hands, and bits of white paper -
torn up fragments of the letter - swirl about her, cascading to the
ground among the autumn leaves. The clarity of every detail, from the
distant arcade to the raised stitching on her leather gloves, is
painted with confidence and panache.
Jacques Joseph Tissot was born in France in 1836. He doesn’t fit easily
into that march of progress which we know as art history. As a painter
of the contemporary scene, he is included here with the French painters
known as the Realists. Those painters, from Corot through Cezanne,
usually created an art more infused with the improvised brushwork of
plein air painting.
Tissot’s technique doesn’t follow this trend. After training in the
Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, he exhibited in the annual Salons from
1859 to 1870, showing porcelain smooth, detailed scenes from Medieval
and Directoire eras.
Tissot couldn’t renounce his style, but he progressively abandoned
historical fiction as subject matter. He began to set his scenes in the
contemporary world. Though in earlier times artists had learned to
paint by copying other painters, and much was reduced to a formula.
Tissot’s penetrating observation of the world around him - for example
to brilliantly rendered chestnut leaves - was based on drawing from
nature and the judicious use of photographs.
The new patrons were wealthy bourgeois, and so Tissot peopled his
pictures with portraits of them, at home or at play. The characters in
The Letter seem motivated by the concerns one would find in a novel by
Emile Zola. Though they seem confident to us, “for the Victoria
viewer,” Christopher Wood has written, “Tissot’s pictures represented
the uneasy, even ridiculous world of the socially aspiring... Where we
see only elegance and distinction, they saw merely vulgar, over-dressed
people.”
Tissot’s own life is the stuff of novels. The last vestiges of the
French monarchy was restored after the revolution of 1848, and Napoleon
III later began an ill-advised war with Prussia. The Prussians invaded
Paris and left the governing to a new Commune. Tissot fought against
the Prussians from the walls of the city, but soon became involved with
the Commune. When it fell after two months, Tissot fled to London in
1871.
Monet and Pissaro were also in London at the time but, unlike them,
Tissot exhibited at the Royal Academy. For the next eleven years he
painted portraits and genre pieces with great success. He lived openly
with the beautiful Irish divorcee Kathleen Newton who became the model
for many of his paintings. A frisson of the socially-unaccepable tinges
many of his paintings and at times they project a mood of unmistakable
tension and unease.
Newton died of consumption and Tissot returned to Paris in 1882, where
he set to reclaim his reputation with a series of fifteen paintings of
The Women of Paris. In the midst of this, he underwent a religious
conversion and dedicated the rest of his life to painting the life of
Christ.
The Letter is a painting from his years in London. There is a clarity
here which is photographic, or even cinematic. This easy facility
judged against Tissot’s reputation for many years, as the more rugged
aspects of Monet and Van Gogh took the high ground. But now that the
juggernaut of modernism has passed, we are free to rediscover and enjoy
this fine artist of the past. There will be many young visitors to the
gallery who, ignorant of the march of art history, will find this
painting by Tissot fascinating.
___________________________________________
Copyright © 2004Robert Amos
Robert Amos is an artist and art writer who lives in Victoria, B.C.. He can be contacted by
e-mail and you can view his paintings at
www.robertamos.com