James Tissot

Born in Nantes, France, James Tissot trained in Paris at the âEcole des Beaux-Arts. His mature career spanned both sides of the English Channel, where he garnered commercial and critical success. Despite recognition from patrons and peers, his reputation suffered posthumously. The critic John Ruskin's perception that Tissot created unhappy mere color photographs of vulgar society" persists, and the artist is still too often classified as a painter of pretty women and fancy society portraits. However, scholarship demonstrates that even Tissot's most frothy society paintings reveal rich and complex commentary on Victorian culture. Tissot consistently defied convention in both his professional and personal life. This catalogue explores his multifaceted career with a fresh perspective and original scholarship to question where and how he should be situated in narratives of the nineteenth-century canon. Although he featured prominently in the recent Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity exhibition of 2012-2013 (Musâee d'Orsay, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago), Tissot did not formally belong to the Impressionist circle and never exhibited in the group's shows, despite invitations from Edgar Degas. Tissot's long association with Degas is a major thread in the catalogue: he frequently acted as Degas's mentor in the 1860s and early 1870s, and they shared an extended series of correspondence. The portrait James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot (1836-1902), painted around 1867-1868 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) by Degas, remains an iconic image of the urbane artist as a refined gentleman"--