Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836-1902), who called himself James from at least the time he began art studies in Paris, lived and worked in the French capital from 1855 to 1871, then again from late 1882 until his death. From mid-1871 until late 1882 he lived in London, but visited the city from time to time both before and after that period. He also travelled across the country to places as far apart as Glasgow, Brighton, Manchester and Newcastle, at the invitation of dealers, exhibition organisers and patrons, to view exhibitions where his work was shown or to make studies for portraits. Other visits Tissot made for sketching purposes included trips up the Thames to Twickenham, Richmond and Oxford, and rail or steamer trips to the south coast. The location and identity of the church and parsonage in Le Presbytère are unknown but the church architecture is English fourteenth century, according to Professor Paul Crossley, the medieval specialist at the Courtauld Institute of Art. The distant tower of a castle or church on the left might help identify the location. Tissot was a Roman Catholic and regular Mass attender but there were few Catholic churches in England as Roman Catholics had been banned from practising their religion for three centuries. The artist’s caricatures for Vanity Fair magazine included Anglican clergymen but little is known about the extent of his social circle, or individual friends and acquaintances, other than fellow artists. It is probable that Tissot was friendly with a broad range of Anglicans as well as Catholics, since he did not become overtly religious until after his visit to the Holy Land in 1886, when he became very devout and focused on the illustration of the life of Christ then of the Old Testament.

Two of the things that Tissot most admired in England were English buildings and gardens. His house in Paris, at the end of the very fashionable newly constructed Avenue de l’Impératrice (now Avenue Foch) near the Bois de Boulogne, was ‘an English-style villa’ set in a small garden. When he decided to settle in London, because his work was selling much faster and for higher sums than it had in Paris, Tissot bought the leasehold of a Queen Anne-style villa in St John’s Wood, built of red brick with white stone dressing and having a large garden. He added a huge conservatory for exotic plants, extending from a new studio, and laid out the garden with formal English-style colour beds and areas of more informal ‘romantic’ planting such as he was familiar with from French parks. There were kitchen gardens too, and existing greenhouses expanded for fruit and vegetables as well as flowers. The contrast of red brick and green vegetation seen in Le Presbytère, with its brick-built Gothic church and added house, creeper-covered buttresses and kitchen garden, appears in numerous paintings by Tissot. For example, The Convalescent (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto), dated 1870 or 1872, sets a white-clad figure by red-brick planters filled with ferns and exotic plants in various shades of green; and pictures set in Tissot’s London garden frequently include red/green juxtapositions of brick and vegetation, such as in the background of Matinée de Printemps (Collection of Mrs Wrightsman), dating from about 1874, to the several versions of La Soeur ainée, about 1881-82, showing Kathleen Newton seated on the steps leading down from the studio or conservatory to the garden.

Tissot had an astounding facility with paint and could give the impression of particular plants or objects through a touch or swirl of his brush. The deft way in which are painted the cabbages, sunflowers and crookedly angular tree branches in Le Presbytère recall passages in Matinée de Printemps and other garden paintings such as En plein soleil (Collection of Mrs Wrightsman). Small dabs of red or yellow to indicate the blooms of geraniums, nasturtiums or sunflowers are a device used by Tissot to draw the eye and enliven the painting, and flicker across many of his garden paintings in the same way that they do in Le Presbytère. A black cat walking across the cinder footpath in the background of En plein soleil echoes the tabby cat in the foreground of Le Presbytère, whose stripes enhance the animation given to the scene by the movement of this animal caught as in a snapshot photograph. The cat has turned its head and stares out at the painter and us, the viewers. Tissot frequently included a figure looking out and directly engaging the viewer, though it was more usually a woman in this role than a cat.

The technique of painting in oils on a reddish-brown prepared ground, which is employed in Le Presbytère, was one favoured by Tissot for sketches and compositional studies. He would rough out the composition with pencil or dark paint then fill in areas of sky or highlights with toned white oil paints, in a similar way to the painting of the sky to the left of the tree in Le Presbytère. Touches of colour were then added but the ground showed through to a greater or lesser extent, giving overall tone and body and saving the time that would be needed to fill in dark areas on a pale ground. Use of a dark ground in this way was common practice among French artists. Le Presbytère has a level of detail that is more usually found in Tissot’s paintings on wooden panels or canvas. This suggests it was a picture created impromptu with sketching materials the artist had to hand, painted on the spot en plein air. Pin-holes in the corners indicate where the card was pinned to a wooden board for support while working.

Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz
12 October 2009

Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz is currently writing a book on James Tissot to be published by Phaidon Press. She organised and selected Tissot exhibitions for the Barbican Art Gallery, London/Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and Musée du Petit Palais, Paris in 1984-85, and for Brain Trust Inc, Tokyo, in 1988, and worked as a curator, arts officer and editor before returning to research in recent years while continuing to work in museums. She is also the world expert on the British and European pictures of 19th century artist David Roberts.