Tissot

“… In the mid 1870s James Tissot met Kathleen Newton (1854-1882), an Irish divorcee with a distinctly colourful past. She had formed a sexual relationship with a man on a voyage to India to be married, and borne 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 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. With 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 rumoured 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…” ~ World Classic Gallery

“According to his own account, Tissot, at around age 48, saw a vision during Mass in the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris.” (Figured in Dan Brown)  “… he had a 'vision' in which he saw the Savior and two men sitting in the rubble of a building that looked like what we later saw in pictures of World War I," Wright says. "He saw it as a witness of the Atonement for all men. And he decided the rest of his life would be devoted to religious painting." “After his mystical experience, Tissot’s work changed markedly. His next painting, “Inward Voices,” depicts his vision: an impoverished couple sit on the rubble of a building in ruins; beside them sits Jesus—scourged, bleeding and wearing a crown of thorns, yet present to comfort them. Tissot’s religious experience at St. Sulpice resulted in a lifelong directional shift in his artistic work…

Four years later, after his vision, Tissot undertook an artistic project that led him to study archeology and the Bible, and he traveled three times to the Middle East, where he filled sketchbooks with images of the people and places he observed… Tissot was bound by the beliefs of his time. His is a single, harmonized Gospel story, untroubled by the questions that modern biblical scholarship has raised and the contradictions it has pointed out. Mistakenly, he thought the culture of the Middle East had not changed much since the time of Jesus and so worked diligently to capture the similarity on paper before modernity could erase it.

But this “mistake” accounts for some of the admirable documentary detail of his work: the patterns of rugs, tiles, lattices, textiles, capitals and costumes; and the precise rituals and pageantry, including the segregated society of men and women. Jesus walks through narrow passageways; sits in dark, moonlit rooms; strides down stone streets; and when not on the sea, traverses a pink, gold or blue landscape with oases of palms and olive trees that is starkly beautiful—its rock piles casting gray and mauve shadows. At times one also sees the Jerusalem of Tissot’s day—its red-and-white striped buildings bleached white in the gleaming sun.

Tissot’s people are dynamic and lifelike. Tissot’s cast of characters extends beyond the leading roles to include townspeople whom viewers can recognize throughout the series... Although Tissot strove for historical realism, his images of spirits, angels and demons are highly imaginative, as fantastic and modern as a still shot from James Cameron’s “Avatar.” In one of the temptation scenes, “Jesus Transported by a Spirit Onto a High Mountain,” a huge, shadowy figure lifts a shimmering, white-robed Jesus upward, as in flight, through a purple sky. Tissot’s images blend realism and romanticism in a Victorian style that still appeals to many museumgoers. They do not startle the viewer as they once did but now look familiar.

Indeed, Hollywood epics have been based on them. And scenes of the suffering of Jesus from Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” and the appearance of the Ark of the Covenant in Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” both owe a debt to Tissot. After years of intense labor, Tissot exhibited his work in Paris, then in London and the United States. Viewers responded with reverence, awe and tears. Crowds were hushed. Most reviews were laudatory, though not all; one likened the realistic style of the work to a Baedeker guide. When the series was published, the Tissot “Bible” became an international best seller.

In 1896, at age 60, Tissot returned to Palestine to begin a similar series of illustrations of the Old Testament. He completed 95 watercolors and many drawings before his death in 1902. That collection is currently held by the Jewish Museum in New York City.

To believers, Tissot’s images reveal something more: signs of a vibrant Christian imagination. He did more than represent the land where Jesus walked. Tissot saw himself as a spiritual pilgrim. He reflected on each image and seems to have placed himself in the scenes as the various characters, much as St. Ignatius Loyola recommends in the Spiritual Exercises: as a prodigal son, a child of Jerusalem, a Roman soldier, a mother with a sick child, a condemned thief, a woman at the empty tomb and a convinced follower. Tissot’s visionary images can also help viewers to do the same.”

"Degas complained that Tissot was no fun since he 'got religion,' " Wright says. But his work was shown in the State Salon in Paris, and reports talk of the clergy coming in record numbers, and of women kneeling before the paintings weeping, she says… She can relate to the women of the Paris exhibition. "I've had my moments here," she says. But what's so fun, she adds, is that "it's like a little detective game. Every time you look, you find interesting little facts, new things. He really captured a sense of what the Holy Land looked like. It's so interesting to see how he depicts divine things, to look at the details in the rugs and furnishings."

Tissot shows a younger Joseph than many painters. He used a rare saffron color for the robes of the Magi. The sojourn in Egypt shows a reddish-haired boy at the docks. A young carpenter carries a wooden plank in a way that foreshadows his fate. He wears traditional Hebrew clothing as he reads scrolls in the synagogue. At Bethesda, mystical hands stir the water. There are so many interesting details, Wright says. As Tissot wrote in one of his commentaries, "I have chosen from amongst the scenes of the public life of Jesus, those which best illustrate not only what He is, but what He was, and what He ought to be to us. Especially those which, being more suggestive than others, are a better starting-point for the imagination in its effort to rise to the comprehension of that incomprehensible ideal which is the Christ."
~ The Artist as Believer