James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot

Influenced by the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, Tissot and his fellow painters Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas turned from traditional paintings of history, religion and mythology in favor of works revealing elements of daily life, including trends in fashion and interior decoration, places of leisure and of business (Nancy Rose Marshal and Malcom Warner, James Tissot, Victorian Life/Modern Love, exh. cat., New Haven 1999, p. 35). Specifically, Tissot came to such “modern” painting by experimenting with the portrait (Michael Wentworth, James Tissot, Oxford, 1984, p. 46).  To effectively yet subtly capture a person’s character, the artist captured their inner psychology via outer appearance—their posture, clothing and environment. More than a liberating aesthetic challenge, portraiture also provided Tissot with a ready source of income; he earned his early livelihood in Paris by painting hotel housekeepers and maids in his neighborhood. Soon thereafter his early submissions to the Paris Salon of 1859 consisted of little circular portraits d’initaux notable for their delicate tones, accurate drawing, and sober expressions (Wentworth, p. 46). 

Completed five years after these first Salon portaits, and in the same year as two Tissot masterworks Les Deux Soeurs; portrait (The Two Sisters; Portrait, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Portrait of Mlle. L.L. (oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), this Portrait of a Lady expands upon the artist’s portraiture technique. Unlike the Impressionists, Tissot continued to paint with a tight, precise style empathizing minute attention to detail, combining academic technique and his particular vision of urban life (Marshall and Warner, p. 35).  Such qualities are immediately evident in the present work, a three-quarter-length portrait of a neatly dressed woman sitting in a green garden chair and set against a leafy hedge flocked with red flowers.  While similar in format to his 1861 Salon submission of Mlle M. P… (now commonly known as Lady in Black), this does not record the same sensual femininity. Rather, this Portrait of a Lady’s appeal derives more from its aesthetic composition.  The shallow picture space, limited color palette, and fine modeling of the figure’s face define her as a decorative object rather than an individual. Indeed, the sitter’s identity remains unknown, and she looks away from the viewer, lost in introspection.  This rather objective view suggests elements of the aesthetic movement in mid to late nineteenth century art, in which artists employed decorative details, rather than an easily understood narrative, to create a particular mood or feeling. The present work may thus reveal Tissot’s early influence by his contemporary James Abbot McNeill Whistler or Sir John Everett Millais, who explained his art was intended to be “fully of beauty and without subject” (as quoted in Wentworth, p. 51).  Above all these artistic influences, an important source for Tissot’s portrait may be as “everyday” as the carte de visite photographs--small albumen prints mounted on cards 2 1/2  by 4 inches—which were widely popular upon their invention by Parisian photographer André Adolphe Disderi in 1854.  Because these cartes were small and standard in size and relatively inexpensive to produce, families and friends could easily select images that portrayed them best.  The majority of such cartes depict individuals posed similarly to Tissot’s lady.  Further, their petite size, as with the present painting, allowed little room for props or extraneous detail. Pose, and placement, therefore, were the key communicators of the personality and identity of the person envisioned.