JAMES-JACQUES-JOSEPH TISSOT

Please note that this work will be sold unframed.

Paris, Exposition Universelle, 1867

Willard E. Misfeldt, The Albums of James Tissot, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1982, fig. I-47, p. 28, illustrated
Michael Wentworth, James Tissot, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 42
James Tissot 1836-1902, exh. cat., Barbicon Art Gallery, London, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, Nov. 1984-Jun. 1985, pp. 85-86, illustrated

This picture may surprise those who think of Tissot as a society painter. Rather than the expected palette of more vibrant hues, the colors here are hard and somber variations of blacks, browns, grays, and scarlets. The subject is not a stylish contemporary woman but fancifully dressed figures posed in a romantic courtyard, almost as if on stage. Yet while this early composition may seem unrelated to Tissot's mature oeuvre, it portends the artist's later successes with rendering atmospheric moods and technical perfection. Moreover, Le Rendez-vous reveals an enthusiasm for adapting literary sources--a project to which Tissot would return at the end of his life with his Old and New Testament series. Scenes of the Middle Ages and sixteenth-century dominated much of his early work, which explored the moral dilemmas posed by Goethe and Faust along with popular tales of historical adventure and romance from the genre troubadour. The developing artist was further influenced by the Salon presentations of Gérôme's gothic work and by a now little-known Belgian painter, Henri Leys, who in the mid-nineteenth century attempted to regenerate the principles and subjects of the Northern Renaissance painters. Tissot melded these many resources with his own personal interest in the complicated relationships between men and women—particularly those falling in love. Le Rendez-vous is only one in a loose series, which also includes Promenade sur les remparts (1864, Stanford University of Art, Palo Alto, California), Tentative d'enlèvement (Fig. 1, 1865, Private Collection) and L'enlèvement (circa 1865-67, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes), in which male and female protagonists cross from painting to painting, creating a continuous narrative that provides different perspectives on romance. The present work is perhaps the most mannered of the group, poised yet balletic in the push-pull of the paramour's firm grasp of the wrist of his demurely resistant lover. Depicted within a highly decorated courtyard of cloisonné vases, reflecting pool, and rose briars, the pleasure of love mingles with more ambiguous, dangerous elements: upon closer observation, one notes the thorny plant branches, leaf-strewn water, and crumpled costume thrown across a chair.

Ironically, critics who viewed Tentative d’enlèvement at the Salon of 1865 and Le Rendez-vous worried that Tissot was backsliding from modern painting to a directoire-styled genre painting. But by setting his works in the past, Tissot was clearly following his belief that a certain degree of distance, either in time or place, could create something truly powerful. While he considered historical subjects superior, Tissot did believe they could be modernized. Without a clear source material or moral lesson, Le Rendez-vous infuses costume drama with modern, emotional complexity to create a carefully observed scene of isolation and psychological unease.