QUERELLE D’AMOUREUX (Lover's Quarrell)

Exhibited
Yale, 1999;
American Federation of Arts: James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love, September 22, 1999-2 July 2000, Exhibition no. 43;
Ashmolean, Oxford, 2017, where on loan with The Bunch of Lilacs (1875) and Algernon Moses Marsden (1877);

Literature
James Tissot’s sales notebook or Carnet de ventes (whereabouts unknown; photocopy in Mantion Collection), second entry under 1876;
James Tissot’s photograph album, London. From 1871 to 1878 (private collection), unnumbered, 38th of 64 images, Connoisseur, March 1955, Hammer Galleries advertisement;
Etching by Tissot dated 1876 (Wentworth 18) published by Tissot in Ten Etchings by J. J. Tissot, Tissot 1876;
James Jacques Joseph Tissot: A Retrospective Exhibition, Exh. Cat., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence and Art Gallery of Ontario Toronto, 1968, no, 63;
Willard E. Misfeldt, ‘James Jacques Joseph Tissot: A Bio-Critical Study’, PhD dissertation, Washington University, 1971, p. 159; Michael Wentworth, James Tissot: Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints, Minneapolis Institute of Art, 1978, p. 90, fig. 18b;
Michael Wentworth, James Tissot, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 111, p. 121, pl. 97;
James Tissot, Exh. Cat., Barbican Art Gallery, London and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 1984-1985, p. 116;
James Tissot, Exh. Cat., Petit Palais, Musée de Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris, Paris, p. 186;
Christopher Wood, Tissot: The Life and Work of Jacques Joseph Tissot, 1836-1902, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986, pp. 76-77, fig. 74;
Willard E. Misfeldt, J. J. Prints from the Gotlieb Collection, Alexandria, VA, 1991, p. 52;
Nancy Rose Marshall and Malcolm Warner, James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love, Exh. Cat., Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Musée du Québec, Québec City, and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1999-2000, pp. 105-107, illustrated back frontispiece;
Katharine Lochnan (Ed.), Ann Saddlemyer, ‘Spirits in Space: Theatricality and the Occult in Tissot’s Life and Art’, p. 147 and p. 151, fig. 54 and Carole G. Silver, ‘Tissot’s Victorian Narratives: Allusion and Invention’, p. 132; in Seductive Surfaces: The Art of Tissot, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999;
Melissa E. Buron with Krystyna Matyjaszkiewic, James Tissot, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Delmonico Books, 2019, p. 291, illustration pl. 51;
An etching of Querelle d’amorureux was exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Paris Salon and Durand Ruel’s gallery in 1876 under the title The Garden at St John’s Wood.

In Querelle d’Amoureux (or Lover’s Tiff) we watch the couple’s romantic, flirtatious ‘dance’, around the colonnade, as the man leans forward against a column, mimicking the solid lean of the trunk of the large willow tree. He holds his hands behind him, with one dapper foot tucked behind the other. The woman turns her head away from him, the hint of a coy smile playing around her lips, possibly toying with his affections. Is their quarrel part of an elaborate flirtatious game? Their heads are level and she could, in the next moment, turn her head to meet his. The light catches the nape of her neck, highlighting the soft curls escaping beneath her ornate plaited hair and her skin glows against the dark backdrop. Tissot delights in the textures of her dress, the luxuriance of the fur trim and intricate and elaborate folds and pleats of her dress and the jaunty angle of her raffia hat decorated with red cherries.

Tissot is a master of the suggested story. There is allusion but it is ambiguous and the viewer is left to speculate as to what has just happened or is about to happen. There is an untold story and Tissot turns the painting into a narrative of our own imagination. It makes Tissot’s paintings fresh and relevant, both to his contemporaries and to us. Warner suggests that Tissot follows, ‘The tradition of British modern-life painting, from Hogarth to the Pre-Raphaelites, … essentially a narrative tradition. Most British art aspired to the condition of story-telling… Painters strove to tell the stories in which their characters were involved with maximum clarity, choosing just the right moment of action, spelling things out in gestures, facial expressions and easily legible symbolism. With Tissot, by contrast, there is always an ambiguity, a tease.’ (Malcolm Warner, Kimbell Art Museum).

Perhaps the ‘Quarrel’ that the couple have had is an ironic reflection of the elaborate rituals of flirtation in a society governed and dictated by a set of rigid rules of behaviour. Tissot’s portrayal of this is never cruel but rather we laugh or cry gently with his subjects at the ‘irony that suffuses his portrayal of the fashionable, slightly questionable set who were his favourite stratum of British society.’ (Malcolm Warner, ‘The Painter of Modern Love’, James Tissot: Victorian Life, Modern Love, 1999, p. 13). Warner writes that Tissot, ‘shows too evident a delight in beauty and pleasure, in his characters’ finery and savoir-faire, for his meaning to be taken as disapproval. He mocks what he loves, maintaining a cool, dandyish detachment from the sophisticated set while revelling in every detail of its appearance and behaviour.’ (Malcolm Warner, ‘The Painter of Modern Love’, James Tissot: Victorian Life, Modern Love, 1999, p. 13).

At a time when unmarried ladies would have been chaperoned, the couple appear to be either on their own or they have moved away from the party that they are with, thus, escaping protocol. In Tissot’s painting, Holyday (or The Picnic), (c. 1876, Tate), from the same year and set also in Tissot’s garden in St John’s Wood, a similar couple appear in the background, flirting around the colonnade, slightly hidden by the willow’s branches. Such episodes of flirtations that occur at an outdoor picnic are suggestive of the fête galante – a French genre of painting, favoured by Watteau, showing episodes of courtship in an idyllic setting. In Holyday, several other episodes are described: The young woman on the right has her back turned firmly away from the man lying on the ground who holds his hand up to support himself but also, seemingly, to shield himself from her; he holds his cup up to be filled by another young lady, her loose hair tumbling over her shoulder; the elderly chaperone nods off under the tree seemingly oblivious or unconcerned by the flirtation occurring around her; standing directly behind her in the shadows, a young man leans against the chestnut tree, next to him stands a woman (only her bonnet visible), hinting that it was possible to hide away from the supposedly watchful chaperone who represented the morals of the day. St John’s Wood was considered a rather disreputable area and this picture was considered by some critics to be rather vulgar.

In Querelle d’amoureux we have the impression that the woman is fully in charge of herself and her emotions. If there is a quarrel, she is mistress of it and may even be enjoying her power over her companion. We have a similar sense with Rivals (1878-79, private collection) in which the woman (a young widow) sits carefully crocheting, her dextrous, delicate fingers literally ‘manipulating’ the two old men who have come as rivals for her hand. She leans back, at her ease, against a tiger skin. In this case, she is the tiger and the men are her prey, much like the ceramic rabbit that sits on the wall next to the bearded gentleman; this idea is exacerbated by the ‘jungle’ setting of the conservatory signifying the ruthless nature of courtship. Although the woman is seemingly in control, underlying this the painting makes a comment on the institution of marriage in a society which would have a young woman marry one of her elderly suitors, as being her only recourse. As such, she carefully weighs up which one. The woman’s choice, in this case, appears to be a bluff old gentleman (decades her senior) or a slightly younger, supercilious patriarch who looks down his aquiline nose; the event is not a match of love but a financial transaction. The male reviewer for The Times describes the painting as being set, ‘as usual, in the boudoir life of luxuriously appointed villas, where graceful ladies, in irreproachable costume, keep a brace of rivals in play at five o’clock tea, plying their crochet pins the while as demurely as if men’s affections were women’s natural playthings.’ He makes no comment on the young woman’s affections or only means of livelihood and survival.

In Reponse a la lettre (c. 1874, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; sold by Tissot with this title, but recorded on receipt by Agnew’s as The Reply), the woman wears the same skirt as the woman in The Garden at St John’s Wood but with a more sombre black, ruffled jacket. She stares into the distance, a look of resigned disdain on her face, as she tears up a letter, a favourite Victorian symbol for absent or unrequited love. The woman holds her contained heartache in her upright frame as it seems that with the letter her hope of love dies. The pieces of the letter fall to the ground at her feet joining the fallen, dead leaves of the chestnut tree. Leo Tolstoy’s tragic novel Anna Karenina was published in book form in 1879 but had been released in serial instalments from 1873 to 1877. As Tolstoy’s complex novel deals with a panoply of relationships: betrayals, betrothals, flirtations, women’s place in society, society’s etiquette and manners á-la-mode, marriage and death, so Tissot’s canvases reflect London’s society in the human emotions that he paints. A large part of what drew buyers to Tissot’s work was what Buron describes as his ability to capture ‘nuances and reflections’ in bourgeois life, a skill he honed in Paris but also, more rigorously, in London.

In The Crack Shot (or At The Rifle Range*) (1869, The National Trust Collection, Wimpole, Cambridgeshire), the artist unusually depicts an active, independent woman, contained and absorbed in her actions. Sir Michael Levey described the women in Tissot’s paintings as: ‘Elegantly rather than ostentatiously dressed, though very much dressed, costumed, encased in clothes that seem at once plumage and armour, women occupy a prominent yet uncertain place - disturbing, even perhaps provoking, men more than, apparently, feeling much themselves …. [they] not only cast a potent spell over men, but seem often to do so half against their will. How bored they are with their role! To escape from the burden of being attractive, of causing emotional stress, might be supposed the chief feeling with which, in painting after painting, they gaze beyond the spectator’.

Tissot, whether through business reasons or concern for his personal safety, decided to leave Paris for London in 1871 when France was in turmoil after the Franco-Prussian War. Tissot had become a member of the Garde Nationale, defending the French capital and later became a member of the Paris Commune, which briefly ruled Paris and attempted to protect Parisians and their property. Through his art, he had built up a network of friends and business contacts in London. One of these was Thomas Gibson Bowles (1841–1922), the proprietor of the popular magazine Vanity Fair, a new Society magazine which had made its début in London in 1868. Tissot had occasionally supplied his friend with caricatures of prominent men for Vanity Fair and Bowles now provided Tissot with a place to stay in London and employed him as a caricaturist on the magazine.

Tissot arrived in London, leaving a burning, partly-destroyed Paris, in the midst of the Season – four months of débutante balls, exclusive dinner parties, the annual Royal Academy Exhibition and other large social events. His reputation grew as a painter of elegantly and fashionably dressed women shown in scenes of the beau monde of fashionable society. In Victorian Painting (1987, p. 180), Graham Reynolds wrote that Tissot worked to, ‘record the glittering appearance of the world of society, rich and ostentatious on a broader scale than it had ever had been before’. Ruskin characterised these themes as ‘vulgar society’, but Tissot’s paintings appealed greatly to wealthy British industrialists and his art had a meteoric rise in popularity so that during 1872 he earned 94,515 francs, an income normally only enjoyed by those in the top echelons of society. He was ‘a grand interpreter of the high life’ (Reynolds) and his paintings showcase the splendours available to the wealthy: exotic plants from around the world, oriental and eighteenth century objets d’art, and beautiful women adorned beautifully in the latest fashions. He came to the contemplation of this section of London life with the twin advantages of being an outsider and having a sophisticated training. His paintings were bought by collectors whose lifestyle mirrored that depicted in his art.

Under Bowles, Tissot’s insightful caricatures appeared in Vanity Fair, under the name ‘Coïdé’, in the period from 1869 to 1873, alongside those of ‘Ape’ and before the arrival of ‘Spy’. One of Bowles’ closest friends was the dashing Gus Burnaby (Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, 1842-1885), a captain in the privileged Royal Horse Guards, the cavalry regiment that protected the monarch. Gus, a member of the Prince of Wales’ set, had suggested the name, Vanity Fair, lent Bowles half of the necessary £200 in start-up funding, and then volunteered to go to Spain to chronicle his adventures for the satirical magazine.

In 1870, Bowles, commissioned Tissot to paint Captain Burnaby and his small portrait (1870, National Portrait Gallery) seems to cut through to the essence of the person (as do his caricatures for Vanity Fair) and bursts with life. ‘Soldier, traveller and balloonist’ (National Portrait Gallery), Burnaby is unconventional, debonair, and dashing. Similarly, in his self-portrait of 1865, Tissot presents himself as a slightly addled, knowing, man-about-the-world and world-weary artist (Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco). We are reminded that he was friends with Whistler, Degas, Manet and other avant garde Impressionists, although he declined Degas’s invitation to show his work in Paris with the Impressionist independents in Paris in 1874. Tissot bought Manet’s Blue Venice in 1875 for 2,500 francs when Manet badly needed the income. Tissot hung the painting in his home in St. John’s Wood and tried to interest English dealers in Manet’s work. Berthe Morisot, in an 1875 letter to her sister, Edma Pontillon, wrote, ‘We went to see Tissot, who does very pretty things that he sells at high prices; he is living like a king. We dined there. He is very nice, a very good fellow, though a little vulgar. We are on the best of terms; I paid him many compliments, and he really deserves them.’ During the same trip, Morisot wrote to her mother, ‘[Tissot] is turning out excellent pictures. He sells for as much as 300,000 francs at a time. What do you think of his success in London? He was very amiable, and complimented me although he has probably never seen any of my work.’

Tissot carried his satirical take on society through into his society paintings with gentle nudges and nuances which suggest that, although living in the beau monde and earning his living from it, he could see through its conventions to the human truths beyond. The painter Louise Jopling (1843 – 1933), wrote in her autobiography that Too Early (1873), ‘made a great sensation…It was a new departure in Art, this witty representation of modern life.’ One critic wrote that he ‘fairly out-Tissoted himself in his studies of character and expression. [The] truthfulness and delicate perception of the humour of the ‘situation’ [compares to that found] in the novels of Jane Austen, the great painter of the humour of ‘polite society’.’ In Too Early, Tissot deftly observes the awkwardness and shame of being the first guest to arrive at a party. Even Tissot’s most ebullient society pictures reveal rich and complex commentary on Belle Époque culture, fashion, and politics. ‘It’s so very relevant today with these social codes and cues … And because he’s a French artist looking at a different society and culture, he can make some of those observations in a way that an insider might not be able to get away with so easily.’ (Buron).

Tissot’s paintings emphasize the artificiality of society through the artificiality of fashion. One writer wrote in 1867, it was an ‘age of shams’ where ‘unreality creeps into everything… the consequence is that woman has become an imposture and men have learned to fear that what they most admire may be but a successful art.’ With the elaborate construction of fashion in the early 1870s, women were the ‘scaffolding on which to display ideas of wealth and beauty’. Yet for the nouveau riche, this was a false portrayal, masking the reality of a newly emerging upper class coming to grips with the rules of society. This was the reality of modernity, or at least the perceived reality of social commentators.

Tissot’s ability to replicate sartorial details earned him a reputation as a recorder of fashion. His mother had a successful millinery business which his father joined and Tissot revelled in the textures of cloth and fashionable attire. Today, fashion historians and film and theatre costume designers can reconstruct actual clothing from Tissot’s paintings. James Laver in his early biography of the artist, concludes that Tissot was ‘assured of his immortality, if not in the History of Art, at least in l’histoire des moeurs, for most books on 19th century costume or society illustrate at least one of Tissot’s pictures’.

Nancy Rose Marshall and Malcolm Warner in James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love (1999, Yale University Press, 1999), linked Tissot’s work to Charles Baudelaire’s iconic essay on the aesthetics of modernity, Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), in which the poet urged artists to employ contemporary life as a serious subject for art. Tissot was highly appreciative of images of popular culture, recognizing their significance in capturing contemporary customs. He was especially drawn to the manifestations of the ceremony and ritual of social life, in particular, modern, romantic love. Baudelaire coined the word ‘modernity and some of his, ‘chapters on aspects of modernity, ‘Beauty, Fashion and Happiness’, ‘Manners and Modes’, ‘The Annals of War’, ‘The Dandy’, ‘Women: Honest Ones and Others’, read like a prescription for Tissot’s themes and interests. Above all, Tissot deals with the manners and customs of modern love: the drama of attraction and flirtation, body language and eye contact, the signs of availability, the many degrees of prostitution, the workings of passion, its frustrations, rivalries and cross purposes, the sorrows of separation and loss – all of these in the particular forms they took in Paris and London in the later nineteenth century.’ (Malcolm Warner, ‘The Painter of Modern Love’, James Tissot: Victorian Life, Modern Love, 1999, p. 9)

With the rise of the department store, the introduction of ready-made wear, and the increase of fashion magazines, those at the forefront of the avant-garde—from Manet, Monet, and Renoir to Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Zola—turned a fresh eye to contemporary dress, embracing la mode as the harbinger of la modernité, and Tissot brought this French concept to London. The novelty, vibrancy, and fleeting allure of the latest trends in fashion proved seductive for a generation of artists and writers who sought to give expression to the pulse of modern life in all its richness. For Baudelaire, an principal element of ‘modernity’ was the correct representation of contemporary fashion. He wrote: ‘The draperies of Rubens or Veronese will in no way teach you how to depict mouire antique, satin a la reine or any other fabric of modern manufacture, which we see supported and hung over crinoline or starched muslin petticoat… Finally the gesture and the bearing of the woman of today give to her dress a life and a special character which are not those of the woman of the past. In short, for any ‘modernity’ to be worthy of one day taking its place as ‘antiquity’, it is necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into it to be distilled from it… Everything that adorns woman, everything that serves to show off her beauty, is part of herself; and those artists who have made a particular study of this enigmatic being dote no less on all the details of the mandus muliebris [the ladies’ dressing room] than on Woman herself… What poet, in sitting down to paint the pleasure caused by the sight of a beautiful woman, would venture to separate her from her costume?’

While dress codes for women dictated a full array of outfits, the options for men in the late nineteenth century were simple and limited. Artists added distinction to their depictions of the modern man with inventive cropping or poses and the novel use of accessories (typified by an assortment of period headwear and canes on view). In Holyday, the men are wearing the caps of I Zingari, an elite amateur cricket club. The reclining male has a vivid red flower in his lapel and his dashing blue socks complement his tan and white laced spectator shoes. His shoes and buff-coloured lounge suit, which was considered a casual look, are similar to the man’s in Querelle d’amoureux. The male here completes his outfit with a straw boater which had been adopted by rowing enthusiasts for summer.

Nancy Rose Marshall argues that ‘‘Woman’ in 1870s society was little more than a mass-produced commodity.’ With the popularity of the department store and the rise of the ready-to-wear clothing industry, fashion was becoming more homogenized and democratized. Class lines were no longer easily distinguishable through dress. Women could purchase garments which were fashionable, but mass produced. While in previous centuries luxury was relegated to the few, increasingly in the nineteenth century luxury—or at least an appearance of luxury—could be gained by the many. As noted by Baudelaire, ‘a woman’s dress was connected with her very being, thus indicating that a woman in a mass produced dress is a mass produced figure herself.’ This idea is reflected in the fashion in Tissot’s art, in which he often uses the same clothing. Sometimes, there is the suggestion that two women wearing the same clothes are sisters, who at the time, might well dress alike; such as the pair dressed in blue in In the Conservatory (private collection; painted and sold as Afternoon Tea in 1874).

The woman’s clothing in Querelle d’amoureux is seen again in Autumn on the Thames, (Nuneham Courtney), (c. 1874-75, private collection; sold by Tissot titled A Windy Day) and Tissot replicates the same blue dresses in Lilacs (1874, private collection) and In the Conservatory (private collection, painted and sold as Afternoon Tea in 1874) and the same pink dress with magenta trim appears in Too Early (1873, Guildhall Art Gallery, London), twice in Hush! (The Concert) (1874, Manchester Art Gallery) and four times in The Ball on Shipboard (c. 1874, Tate); the same woman and dress in London Visitors (c. 1874, Toledo Museum of Art) appears in The Ball on Shipboard, in which also the two blue dresses are seen again, two women wear the same green dress and the two women, centre right, are dressed the same in white dresses with black trim. As one commentator wrote, ‘The reason for the present extraordinary luxury in dress is that the surplus million of women are husband-hunting and resort to extra attractions to that end.’ In The Ball on Shipboard, the women do, indeed, appear as commodities or ‘types’ and the figure dressed in pink, seen multiple times, seems like a gadfly, circulating the party in a social whirl of self-promotion. Elsewhere, Tissot, despite the repetition of dress, carefully insinuates individual and nuanced responses to situations. For such an astute artist as Tissot, with his history of caricature and social incite, it is interesting to wonder why he would put the same dress in the same canvas multiple times and we are left feeling very much that it had to be part of the social commentary that he was making.

Although Tissot made an excellent living in London, the critical reception of his works was by no means always favourable. Often British reviewers were disturbed by their sensuality and suggestiveness, which was seen as vulgar and, perhaps worse still, typically French. Maybe they suspected that, ‘with all his wit and painterly facility, this clever foreigner might be teasing them’ and subtly toying with Victorian codes of respectability. Tissot knew, understood and saw through the strict set of rules and etiquette that governed the behaviour of women. Behaviour was sanctioned even to the use of the fan and one of the only free means of expression open to a woman was through the code of ‘fan language.’ Tissot employs the idiom of the fan in several of his paintings, albeit not necessarily following the ‘code’ but as a physical suggestion (or extended body language) of the inner psychology of the subject. In Young Lady in a Boat (1870, private collection), the gorgeously adorned subject sits with studied boredom, her fan dropping limply at her side, completing the effect of fashionable ennui and indolence. In Young Lady with a Fan (c. 1870/71, private collection), the woman shields herself with her fan as if she has indeed had enough of being looked at. Perhaps more subtly, in the background of In the Conservatory (private collection, painted and sold as Afternoon Tea in 1874), we are given a tantalising glimpse of a woman dressed in white and yellow and a man carrying his top hat behind him. They either pass each other or stand too close for convention; the woman’s fan is fully opened and she lowers her eyes behind it, he looks down on her; we wonder if she is using it as a barrier between her and him or as a means to catch his attention and flirt demurely over the top of it with him. Similarly, in Too Early a couple stand in the doorway and the woman, holding her fully opened fan with two hands, hides her face from her companion behind it; in the group, another woman holds her fan fully opened, distancing herself from the woman in pink who has arrived too early; this woman, walks across the floor, has her fan fully shut and held in front of her, as if, in her discomfort, she tries not to draw attention to the indignity of her faux pas.

In his private life, Tissot flaunted the conventions that he understood so well. His great love was for the beautiful divorced mother of two, Kathleen Newton, who came into his life around 1876 and thereafter was his constant companion, lover, muse and model, coming to live with him in 1877, although she is listed in the 1881 census as living with her sister and two children as a woman of independent means.

Newton appears in many of Tissot’s paintings but she is not the model for the woman in Querelle d’amoureux, which was painted perhaps at a time when she and Tissot were engaged in a similar flirtation. The model appears to be the same unidentified woman who Tissot depicts in Autumn on the Thames in which she wears the same dress. She appears again in The Convalescent, (1875, Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust). Once Newton had entered Tissot’s life, we see her constantly in his paintings, under the chestnuts in a hammock in the Grove Lodge garden (The Hammock, 1879, private collection) and in canvases filled with light – a paean to his love and her beauty (Summer, c. 1878, private collection and, October, 1877, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montreal). Tissot was fascinated by Newton and he described the five years during which she was his muse and model as domestic bliss, as his work focused on her initially radiant, then increasingly frail figure. As with Rossetti, ‘One face looks out from all his canvases.’ (Graham Reynolds, Victorian Painting, 1966, p. 193).

Newton was born in 1854 in Agra, India, where her Irish father worked as an accountant for the British East India Company. She was sent to school in England with her sister, Mary Pauline (Polly), returning to India in 1870 for an arranged marriage to Dr. Isaac Newton, a distinguished army surgeon and widower twice Kathleen’s age. The marriage took place in January 1871 but Kathleen admitted to having fallen in love with a naval captain during the voyage east and her new husband instituted divorce proceedings. Sent back to England, Kathleen gave birth to a daughter, Muriel Violet Mary Newton, in December 1871, and later a son, Cecil George, in March 1876 at her sister’s Hill Road house, down the road from Tissot’s house. Nothing is known about Kathleen’s whereabouts or life between the two births.

The earliest dated portrait of Kathleen is the etched Portrait de M. N. of 1876 popularly called La Frileuse, (meaning a woman shivering as Kathleen constantly felt the cold), in which she wears a fur-edged wrap and a wide-brimmed hat. In 1877, Tissot painted Newton in Mavourneen (private collection) which means ‘my darling’ in Irish, an epithet from a popular song, Kathleen Mavourneen, of the time. Tissot’s French friends described Newton as la ravissante Irlandaise.

Tissot was Roman Catholic and so was unable to marry a divorcée. (Newton converted to Catholicism just before her death.). Cohabitation was common in Victorian England, but was frowned upon by most people in the middle and upper classes. The couple lived, however, as man and wife, with ‘their own little literary and artistic circles, in which the absence of a conventional wedding ring made no difference,’ according to Lilian Hervey, Newton’s niece. She recalled Whistler, Oscar Wilde and his brother Willie, Sir Charles Wyndham, Sir Henry Irving, Miss Mary Moore and Thomas Bowles being regular visitors. William Stone, who was introduced to them by Bowles, described Tissot as, ‘quite a boulevardier and [he] could not grasp our somewhat puritanical outlook’ (as quoted by Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz). As Newton featured increasingly in Tissot’s works, it became well known that he had a grande passion for a married woman with whom he lived. The artist, Louise Jopling recalled in her autobiography, ‘James Tissot was a charming man, very handsome, extraordinarily like the Duke [then, Prince] of Teck. He was always well groomed and had nothing of artistic carelessness either in his dress or demeanour. At one time he was very hospitable, and delightful were the dinners he gave. But these ceased when he became absorbed in a grande passion with a married woman who, to his great grief, died after he had known her but a brief time.’ (Twenty Years of My Life, 1867–1887, London, John Lane, New York, Dodd, Mead, 1925).

When Tissot exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879, Newton was Tissot’s principal model in six out of the eight paintings. Some reviewers were unhappy to see repetition of the same model, while others made allusions to possible impropriety. The Daily Telegraph described Kathleen in The Hammock as, ‘a siren in black silk stockings and high heels’ and warned Tissot that the sooner he abandoned such subjects, the better it would be for his reputation. The critic for The Spectator summed up the prevailing opinion: ‘these ladies in hammocks, showing a very unnecessary amount of petticoat and stocking, and remarkable for little save luxurious indolence and insolence, are hardly fit subjects for such elaborate painting’. For the modern viewer, such paintings, seem to sum up, ‘the warm silence and the dolce far niente that pervade’ much of Victorian society. They are ‘purely visual proof of Henry James’s assertion that ‘summer afternoon’ is the most evocative phrase in the English language’. (Michael Wentworth).

Tissot’s garden, it seems, came to represent a ‘fantasy’ in which he could live his life with his lover Kathleen Newton, secluded from society’s disapprobation. Towards the end of the 1870s, Tissot withdrew from the larger stage: the world of his art became the world of his own home and garden, with the impassive, elegant Newton ever present, like the attendant spirit of the place. He paints her with her children and nephews and nieces in a number of paintings, showing scenes, often outdoors of a happy domestic life. She is seen reading a newspaper in Tissot’s drawing room which led onto the conservatory in Hide and Seek (c. 1877, National Gallery of Art, Washington) and in sewing quietly under the chestnut trees in A Young Nimrod (private collection). Newton often sits apart in these family scenes as if Tissot hints that her position in society sets her apart from her children and family.

Artists’ studios were increasingly becoming the haunt of the fashionable set. In 1840, Balzac described artists as ‘the princes of our century’ and with social recognition came not only great financial reward but also public interest in where and how they lived. The studio of the successful artist was expected to have a beau monde, (or even sometimes a demi-monde) feel to it, filled with exotic treasures and artifice. By 1872 Tissot had earned enough to buy a long lease on the house and garden at 17 Grove End Road in St John’s, an area which was very popular with artists at the time as well as being, ‘an area notoriously associated with irregular relationships’ (Nineteenth Century Decoration, The Art of the Interior, Charlotte Gere, 1989, p 295). By 1875, Tissot was earning nearly £5,000 per year – the same as the foreign secretary. Degas wrote to him: ‘Tissot, why the devil did you not send me a line? They tell me you are earning a lot of money. Do give me some figures.’ With his earnings, Tissot set about renovating the house and garden (which later was remodelled and extended again by Lawrence Alma-Tadema). Tissot commissioned the young Scottish architect, John McKean Brydon, to design and build an extension comprising a studio and conservatory to the house, (the design was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874), which doubled the ground floor space and provided an elegant setting in which to entertain friends and patrons. The painting In the Conservatory is set in the large studio with two bay windows behind, through which can be seen the double-height conservatory in which the lady in Lilacs is pictured.

Tissot re-landscaped the garden and added an elegant curved colonnade with cast-iron columns around a pool copied from the colonnade in Parc Monceau in Paris, one of the new parks created by Baron Haussmann as part of the grand transformation of Paris begun by Emperor Louis Napoleon. Romantic architectural follies, reconstructions of buildings of different ages and continents, filled the park, including a replica Roman colonnade built in 1778. Charmontelle, the architect of the garden, wrote: ‘It was not at all an English garden that was intended at Monceau, but precisely what the critics said; to put together into one garden all times and all places. It is simply a fantasy, to have an extraordinary garden, a pure amusement, and not at all the desire to mimic a nation which, when it makes a ‘natural’ garden, uses a roller on all the greens and spoils nature.’ (Jardin de Monceau, près de Paris, 1779).

The same romantic ‘fantasy’ is suggested by the intimate and picturesque colonnade in Tissot’s garden which became the backdrop for a number of Tissot’s paintings. In the next few years, it would feature in, not only Querelle d’amoureux, but also The Holyday, A Convalescent (1876, Museums Sheffield), Reflections, Summer in the Garden at Grove End Road (private collection), Preparing for the Gala (c. 1874, private collection), The Hammock (private collection) and Tissot’s drawing which was etched, My Garden in St John’s Wood, (1878, etching and drypoint, The Metropolitan Museum, New York). The affection that Tissot felt for his garden, as well as his skill as an artist, is apparent in the cloisonné enamel jardiniere that he made (Jardiniere with Square Panels – The Cave and the Pool, c. 1880-1882, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) which on one side depicts the colonnade and pool.

In some of Tissot’s paintings of Newton, we can see a melancholic portent of the illness that would end her life in 1882 (Kathleen Newton in an Armchair, c. 1881-1882, Musée Baron Martin). She had contracted tuberculosis and her health declined rapidly from 1879. Tissot painted Newton reclining by the pool in the garden Summer Evening (or The Dreamer), (1882, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) shortly before her death. She is beautifully dressed in a frothy pink dress but has a black shawl around her head and neck, black gloves and heavy shadows beneath her eyes. Her beauty is still apparent but so is her suffering. She died on 9th November 1882, aged just twenty-eight. While her coffin stood in Grove End Road draped in purple velvet, Tissot prayed beside it for four days. After a funeral mass at Our Lady’s, near Tissot’s house, she was buried in St Mary’s Cemetery, Kensal Green. Tissot’s life in England was shattered and he left immediately for France. The corsage of purple flowers that Newton wears in Summer Evening (or The Dreamer) appears again in Tissot’s later self-portrait, Portrait of the Pilgrim (1886-1896, Brooklyn Museum) where it is placed on the chair next to the cross, surrounded by the religious and theosophical symbols that Tissot turned to following Newton’s death.

When Tissot returned to Paris, he tried to replicate his former success with a series titled La Femme a Paris (Woman in Paris), dedicated to the modernity of women on the boulevards, in shops, entertainment and society. His paintings bordered on the caricature and, without Newton, his attempt to capture the same joie de vivre seems hollow. As was popular during the late nineteenth century, Tissot dabbled in mysticism and attended Spiritualist séances. He became obsessed with communicating with the spirit of Newton and hired a medium and was convinced that she visited him during a seance in May 1885 held by the well-known spiritualist and medium, William Eglinton who appears with Newton in The Apparition (1885, private collection). Later that same year, a vision of Christ led Tissot to devote the last fifteen years of his life to illustrating the Bible; he made three trips to the Holy Land and produced hundreds of watercolours. Tissot’s religious paintings proved so popular that they travelled as far as the United States, leaving many visitors in tears. Wildly popular during Tissot’s lifetime, these religious images became known as the ‘Tissot Bible’ and have since influenced filmmakers D. W. Griffith (Intolerance, 1916), William Wyler (Ben-Hur, 1959), Steven Spielberg and George Lucas (Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981).

Many of Tissot’s last paintings merged Christian and Spiritualist imagery. Melissa Buron, believed that, ‘Kathleen’s death was a turning point for Tissot,’ and like many of his contemporaries, he ‘didn’t necessarily see a big divide between this kind of mysticism and Judeo-Christian religiosity … it shows how his unabashed religious and spiritual curiosity dovetailed with the cultural zeitgeist of the time’. Volumes documenting the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research found after Tissot’s death at his estate, the Château de Buillon, confirm his sustained interest in Spiritualism. It appears that, rather than an artist woefully out of step with modernism, Tissot was right in line with what was to come, the spiritual in art, which led to the pioneering abstraction of Hilma af Klint, Kandinsky and Malevich, who were all inspired by theosophy.

In the final twenty years of his life, Tissot spent long periods of productive retreat at his family estate in the French countryside, nurturing a growing and deep commitment to religion. He was greatly revered by fellow artists, including Vincent van Gogh, who described Tissot in a letter to his brother Theo in 1880 as ‘great, immense, infinite’.