Sex, death and time rise from Tissot’s art | Canada Voices

There is an 1881 print by the French artist James Tissot now showing at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto that depicts a fashionable woman relaxing in a garden on a summer evening.

Her dreamy pose, parted lips and decollete suggest a sexual being, but to a Victorian audience, the circles under her eyes and the muffler at her neck would also have hinted at her illness. She is Kathleen Newton, Tissot’s favourite model and common-law companion, who would die of tuberculosis the following year, aged only 28: Summer Evening shows a woman who is not merely languid but languishing, her beauty will fade like the summer.

That potent combination of sex and death appears again and again in a small exhibition of Tissot’s prints and paintings organized by guest curator Mary Hunter, an art history professor at McGill University in Montreal who is writing a book about waiting during the Impressionist era.

“It is a transient state and it can be so many things at once, whether you’re waiting for a train, waiting for the bus, waiting for the mail …. But waiting for illness is different,” she said, noting the slow convalescence or the approach of death.

Tissot, who had moved to London from Paris after the Franco-Prussian War and become wealthy selling prints based on his society paintings, was a keen observer of 19th-century women. They spent a lot of time passively waiting – not merely for trains but for also for marriage proposals, childbirth or absent husbands. If they were middle or upper class, their lives were often dedicated to filling time, with embroidery or music, in sharp contrast to the increasingly fast-paced world around them. Working class women waited on others or worked in industry’s bustling factories.

In the AGO show, Tissot, Women and Time, there are three paintings, including The Convalescent, which depicts a young woman in an exotic house dress resting in a conservatory full of tropical plants: Hunter points out how her stasis contrasts with the busy global trade that provided her surroundings.

To the 21st century eye, Tissot’s paintings and prints may read simply as pretty pictures of nice ladies in fancy dresses, but Hunter points to all the complex narratives that would have been understood by his contemporaries. La femme à Paris: Sans Dot (Parisian Women: Without A Dowry), for example, shows a smiling young woman sitting in a park beside her mother, who is reading a newspaper. The older woman would be scanning the matrimonial ads while her daughter’s availability is hinted at by two soldiers in the background, one glancing her way.

This narrative element, and the illustrative quality of Tissot’s art with its insistence on the details of fashion and fabrics, made it more English in style than French. Still, he was a contemporary of the Impressionists, who were also dedicated to painting modern life. Several of them were envious of his success in London and Edgar Degas asked for advice on getting lucrative commissions.

“His French friends were making fun of him for staying in England and making money, and they joked he keeps Champagne on ice for anyone who drops by his house and he’s living this grand life,” Hunter said. The irony, she points out, is that today a small Degas print is worth more than one of Tissot’s largest paintings.

British critics, meanwhile, were quick to suggest his works were risqué – he was French after all – and often read references to sex or sex work into them. For example, The Thames, a print showing two women lounging on a river boat, was assumed to be an image of sex workers because their companion is a naval officer.

The late Allan Gotlieb and his wife, Sondra, donated these prints to the AGO in 1994-95, making the gallery home to the largest collection of Tissot prints outside the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

The AGO’s best known Tissot is La Demoiselle de magasin (The Shop Girl), a large painting the gallery acquired in 1968 that shows an attendant holding the door open for an unseen customer. Outside the shop window, a male passerby eyes the wares – or maybe the shop attendants themselves. Tissot includes some innuendo with an elaborate carving supporting the shop counter that depicts a griffin sticking out its tongue: The French term for window shopping is lèche vitrine, or window licking.

Tissot painted this popular work after Newton’s death, when he returned to France and did a series depicting contemporary Parisian women. The French critics complained he was now too English – and just kept painting the same English woman, that snub-nosed face with the golden hair now lost to him.

His grief over Newton’s death drove him into the arms of spiritualism and his art became religious in subject matter.

“Some of them are these are very intricate Bible scenes and then he also does one of Kathleen Newton as a spiritual figure, this ghost coming back to him,” Hunter said.

“I don’t want to say he totally lost the plot, but …”

Hunter hasn’t included any of these works but one of the later paintings in this show is an unusual portrait of a young woman or child on loan from the Gotlieb collection for the occasion. It shows a passive girl, sickly pale with those tell-tale tubercular circles under the eyes. She is wearing large leather gloves as though ready for an outing or perhaps already sitting in a doctor’s office. The painting is called simply Waiting and there’s no sexual innuendo here: Her brief time is up.

Tissot, Women and Time continues to June 29 at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.