Engaging, sophisticated and witty, Frenchborn artist James Joseph Tissot (1836-19O2) painted for many years in London before returning to Paris in the 1880s. His works not only document contemporary fashion, manners and mores, but also the paradoxes and anxieties of his age. In this book, ten contributors approach Tissot and his art from a variety of theoretical positions and disciplines to arrive at fresh and often startling insights. Looking both at and beneath Tissot’s seductive surfaces, the authors attempt to identify and decode the artist’s subtexts - issues of gender, voyeurism, exhibitionism, fetishism, kitsch and spiritualism...

Engaging, sophisticated and witty, Frenchborn artist James Joseph Tissot (1836-19O2) painted for many years in London before returning to Paris in the 1880s. His works not only document contemporary fashion, manners and mores, but also the paradoxes and anxieties of his age. In this book, ten contributors approach Tissot and his art from a variety of theoretical positions and disciplines to arrive at fresh and often startling insights. Looking both at and beneath Tissot’s seductive surfaces, the authors attempt to identify and decode the artist’s subtexts - issues of gender, voyeurism, exhibitionism, fetishism, kitsch and spiritualism.

Deliberately stamping his work with the appearance and taste of ’vulgar society’, Tissot created paintings and prints that were both aesthetically and socially subversive. He focused on the dichotomy between appearance and reality - while his surfaces are superficially charming, upon closer examination they can be seen as veneers concealing troubling psychological or social dramas. The authors show that Tissot’s narratives may give an impression of accessibility, but to determine their significance is a complex matter. The book also demonstrates the extent to which the art of Tissot offers a rich archaeological site for those with an interest in Victorian Britain and Third Empire society.

This is the sixth in a series of occasional volumes devoted to Studies in British Art, published for the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London.

Preface

Matthew Teitelbaum

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Katharine Lochnan

Colour Plates

The Medium and the Message:

Popular Prints and the Work of James Tissot

Katharine Lochnan

Image or Identity:

Kathleen Newton and the London Pictures of James Tissot

Nancy Rose Marshall

The Invisible and the Blind in Tissot’s Social Recitals

Caroline Arscott

Decent Exposure:

Status, Excess, the World of Haute Couture, and Tissot

Edward Maeder

Painting the ’Parisienne’:

James Tissot and the Making of the Modern Woman

Tamar Garb

Tissot’s Victorian Narratives: Allusion and Invention

Carole G. Silver

Spirits in Space:

Theatricality and the Occult in Tissot’s Life and Art

Ann Saddlemyer

The Conservatory in St. John’s Wood

Margaret Flanders Darby

Tissot as Symbolist and Fetishist? A Surmise

Elizabeth Prelinger

The ’Scientization’ of Spirituality

Serena Keshavjee

Notes on Contributors