“Ah, there you are!” “ The face pressed on the hand, the air a little tired, theSelf portrait by James Tissot welcomes visitors to the Musée d’Orsay. He has been languishing for three months. Hanging on the picture rails, on the eve of confinement, the most English of our painters had remained invisible and with him the hundred of his works brought together for this Parisian retrospective (1), the first since 1985.
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It is tasted with greed, as Tissot intrigues. Beyond the brilliance of his fashionable portraits hides a multiple and versatile artist including Marine Kisiel, Paul Perrin, curators in Orsay, and Cyrille Sciama, director of the Museum of Impressionism in Giverny, show all facets.
Meticulous attention to detail
Trained in the Ingres line, he plagiarized early German or Italian primitives. Without complex, he sells to the State his Faust and Marguerite meet, pastiche of a canvas by his contemporary Henri Leys, for the pretty sum of 5,000 francs. Tissot has business acumen, a worthy son of Nantes merchants enriched in textiles.
Here he is a social portrait for the elite of the Second Empire: the industrialist Aimé Seillière, the family of the Marquis de Miramon, or Le Cercle de la rue Royale, a very select club where aristocrats and new bourgeois fortunes mingle. Peeping at Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites, his painting is bright and colorful, like the partitioned enamels that he will chisel later.
The natural poses, often outdoors, the latest fashion costumes and a meticulous sense of detail, which rivals young photography, flatter the taste of the happy few. Even if the artist slips in there a strange distance, an incommunicability between his figures, dreamy and lonely …
On the way up, he built a private mansion on avenue de l’Impératrice (present-day avenue Foch). He adorns it with Japanese and Chinese objects, such The house of an artist by Edmond de Goncourt, of which he will illustrate a novel. He pins in pretty pictures of pretty visitors admiring his museum residence, like butterflies trapped. A metaphor for the seductions of his art?
Enigmatic children’s games
In fact Tissot captives, when he does not fall into the vulgar anecdote of a Luncheon on the Grass diverted into Square part. Take one of the revelations from the exhibit: The Portrait of the four children of Emile Gaillard, remained in private hands!
The point of view at a child’s height, the black doll abandoned in an armchair, the toy gun pointed outwards and the carpet which undulates in the foreground, creating an optical disturbance, everything seems to compose a mysterious puzzle. And what about this teenager, half lying on a table, who announces the scabrous poses at Balthus? Tissot will paint several of these children’s games, exalting the powers of the imagination (The Little Nemrod), concealment and masks (Hide and Seek).
In his quest for success, was the painter himself forced into cunning? His engagement in the Volunteer Corps in 1870, then his participation in the ambulance service during the Commune questioned. Just like his hasty departure for London. A watercolor of these harsh times – alas absent from the exhibition – captures the execution of the communards, between dread and empathy.
Formulas multiplied by the print
Yet barely a refugee across the Channel, Tissot brilliantly revived his career. Caricaturist for Vanity Fair, he also sketches the Victorian society corseted in Hogarth-style sketches where pretty women flirt with officers. In 1874, he refused to participate in the first exhibition of the Impressionists. From one painting to another, the same Scottish blanket, the same striped dress betray the repetition of his formulas which he soon multiplies through the print. One suffocates there a little, in front of horizons strangely barred with ropes, bulwarks or leaves of faded chestnut trees.
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In love with the blonde Kathleen, suffering from tuberculosis, Tissot measures her fleeting happiness. He paints his Mavourneen (darling), set in pleats, furs and ribbons more sensual than ever. Upon his death, he rushed back to France, like a Prodigal Son, subject of a cycle of paintings that he offers to French museums.
After a series on The Woman in Paris where his elongated and stiffened figures like magazine vignettes are considered a bit old-fashioned, he will launch out, at 50, in an illustrated Bible. Between verism, mystical visions and surprising framing, his watercolors will strongly mark the imaginations and the emerging cinema. Like this wonderful ellipse in which the artist depicts the crucifixion, seen by the Lord himself: two bloody feet overhanging a bewildered crowd.
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A Bible with international success
1885. Tissot has a vision during a spiritualism session, then in the Saint-Sulpice church in Paris. He wants to illustrate the Bible with the editor Mame, who published that of Gustave Doré.
1886 to 1889. Visits Palestine twice, of which he brings back drawings and photographs.
1894 to 1897. Exhibited at the show and then on tour to London, his 365 watercolors from The Life of our Lord Jesus Christ, published in two volumes, were a huge success.
1898. The triumphant tour continues in the United States where Tissot goes. With this Bible, he will gain as much as in thirty years of painter career, however very flourishing.
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