Art Articles & Reviews

} 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