Art and Architecture Books

The nimble recorder

Richard Shone

James Tissot Michael Wentworth (Oxford £50)

James Tissot, rich, famous and housed in n St John's Wood in considerable com- !ea

, Was one of the most discussed painters England in the 1870s. His sophisticated

, ry .GaVositions of contemporary fashionable i 5.had sufficient modernity to intrigue an tilt‘allY startled audience and sufficient orum to keep

p them buying. The English

;nve e of sleek craftsmanship, anecdote and toht moral sentiment was perfectly suited . Tissot's gifts, and in his dozen or so years In England he sold over a million francs' Worth of, in Ruskin's phrase, 'coloured P,11.1113tographs of vulgar society'. Of course, there were some dissenting voices, notably Atne art critic of the Spectator, who trounced e Frenchman for his 'magnified fashion dr ates' and wrote of Tissot's elaborately ,Lessed young women on shipboard or in e ballroom that =their linen forces itself ,Pon One's attention in somewhat offensive quantity and brilliance'. Others deplored the triviality of his subjects — 'hard, vulgar hnd banal' Henry James thought them. If eptiad had the sense to put his women into enie lingerie and strew them about a warble bathroom from Whiteley's, all ould have been well. But no, he would Paint modern life. It was too much to be ex- pected that the English would find him out °n aesthetic grounds. Not a murmur seems lcu have been heard here against his magpie 'Psions Courbet and Whistler, Degas a,nd Stevens, of illustrations from The L.ur.aPhic and `japonisme a la mode 11kado'. It was the suspect moral tone that tt tsed the lorgnette and monocle. And then was something worse. Mrs Kathleen Newton, a large-eyed, .ahaguirl --tinted divorcée of 22, moved into e St John's Wood house with her .two wch,lidren, one of them illegitimate. Tissot nearly twice her age. Where criticism -Vght decently have been directed at ;Issor.s increasingly slick performance as th artist, snide remarks were made about h,e Cheap morality in his work, his irregular b'usehold and the mysterious female (Fair constantly modelled for his pictures. n, This 'earthly paradise', as the author luescribes the Tissot menage, was not to last ,c24- Mrs Newton died of consumption at the age of 28, surely hastened to her death TY. Years of tedious posing in all weathers. Isc't immediately fled back to Paris. A modeof large works on the theme of the t Paris/en/le was followed by a t remend- ous voile face, as notable for its business

acumen as for its psychological comp Y. Tissot, already enmeshed in the skeins of spiritualism (Mrs Newton kissed him at a seance), became a re-born Christian while searching for local colour in St Suit:lice. Society women, as they often do, fell to their knees, this time before his illustrations to the New Testament at the Salon of 1894. Tissot became the well-tailored spokesman for the lunatic fringe of Catholic revivalism. And the Brooklyn Museum, New York, bought the illustrations, 365 of them in lurid gouache, for 60,000 dollars. Tissot's old friend Degas wanted to make a caricature of the artist with Christ whipping him from behind, to be called 'Christ Driv-

ing His Merchants from the Temple'. Supervising the building of an ornamental pool at his château in the country, Tissot died in 1902 and for 30 years was largely

forgotten. Michael Wentworth tells this curious story with commendable brevity as a background to his commentary on Tissot's work. He is detached, amusing and thorough, as alert to Tissot's slim originali- ty as he is to his serious deficiencies. Inter- pretative accounts of pictures alternate with knowing discussions of Tissot's aesthetic and social affiliations. Occasionally there is a desperate bid to say something pointful about a perfectly dull painting — a dim-

looking model, for example, dressed to the nines in a doorway is ,a picture of inter-

rogatory atmosphere fraught with possibilities'. And here and there the fussy particularity of Tissot's style has gilded the

author's — excessive French phrases and the maddening use of ,appassionnement'

throughout. How does Tissot stand up? Not very well well, which one expected, as an artist; very as a nimble recorder of a certain section of

society. One can calculate almost exactly how much material Monsieur Worth used for a certain dress, how much a reception

cost, which side of Belgrave Square these

long-waisted girls have come from. Tissot on the paperback covers of classics will always

add tone, look distinguished. But in the histories of 19th-century art? His plagiarism, which was noted in his lifetime, is a godsend to the expository historian.

There's a twist of Degas, a pinch from Manet, a whole subject from Whistler, all ironed flat by a spectacularly noncommittal

application of paint. There are some ex- cellent portraits, particularly the

languishing Colonel Burnaby, the red stripe of whose uniform trousers is one of Tissot's happiest discoveries. And the frequent note

of melancholy in his work served him well when he came to put on canvas the fading Empress Eugenie and her ridiculous son, decorously exiled among the autumn trees of Chiselhurst.

However Tissot's achievement is evaluated, this monograph certainly gives one plenty to think about. How long will the craze continue for these able minor figures with their astronomical prices in the saleroom, scholarly studies and exhibitions (Tissot will be seen at the Barbican in the autumn)? As John Rewald asked at the time of the Pissarro exhibition four years ago, if such minor artists are given credit for richness of texture, bold representation, `perfection' and `brilliance' (Wentworth on Tissot), 'what words are left to describe the accomplishments of Manet, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and their friends?'