Monthly Archives: March 2014

Artistic intimates: Tissot’s patrons among his friends & colleagues

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “Artistic intimates: Tissot’s patrons among his friends & colleagues.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/artistic-intimates-tissots-patrons-among-his-friends-colleagues/. <Date viewed.>

The wealth of contemporary collectors of James Tissot’s oil paintings gives an idea of the monetary value of his paintings, but Tissot’s work also was esteemed by his friends.

In 1869, Tissot began contributing political cartoons to the newest Society journal in London, Vanity Fair, founded by Thomas Gibson Bowles (1841 – 1922). Tommy Bowles was the illegitimate son of Thomas Milner Gibson (1806 – 1884), a Liberal MP for Manchester and President of the Board of Trade from 1859 to 1866, and a servant, Susannah Bowles. Tommy’s father (and even his father’s wife and children) acknowledged him. Tissot, at 33, was famous in Paris. Tommy, a handsome and mischievous blue-eyed blonde, was five or six years younger and making a name for himself, even in France, with his controversial articles in London’s Morning Post.

By September 1869, Tommy Bowles was paying Tissot to provide caricatures of prominent men for Vanity Fair. Tommy, who gave himself a salary of five guineas a week, initially paid Tissot ten guineas for four drawings. Within a few weeks he increased Tissot’s compensation to eight pounds for each drawing: circulation had skyrocketed.

One of Tommy Bowles’ closest friends was the dashing Gus Burnaby (Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, 1842 – 1885), a captain in the privileged Royal Horse Guards, the cavalry regiment that protected the monarch. Gus, a member of the Prince of Wales’ set, had suggested the name, Vanity Fair, lent Bowles half of the necessary £200 in start-up funding, and then volunteered to go to Spain to chronicle his adventures for the satirical magazine.

Captain Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1870), by James Tissot. 19.5 by 23.5 in/49.5 by 59.7 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London. (Photo: Wikipedia)

In 1870, Tommy Bowles, now 29, commissioned James Tissot to paint a small portrait of Burnaby. Tissot presented Gus in his “undress” uniform as a captain in the 3rd Household Cavalry – and as an elegant gentleman in a relaxed male conversation. The painting was purchased by London’s National Portrait Gallery from Bowles’ son (and Burnaby’s godson), George, in 1933.

Sydney Milner-Gibson (1872), by James Tissot. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

From the time he was a little boy, Tommy Bowles’ stepmother, Arethusa Susannah, a Society hostess who was the daughter of Sir Thomas Gery Cullum of Hardwick House, Suffolk, insisted that he be raised with his natural father’s family of four sons and two daughters. Tommy’s favorite half-sister was Sydney Milner-Gibson, eight years younger, and in 1872, when Sydney was in her early twenties, he commissioned James Tissot to paint her portrait.

In 1880, the unmarried Sydney died of enteric fever* – typhoid – at Hawstead, in Suffolk outside Bury St. Edmunds, two days before her thirty-first birthday. Her younger brother, George Gery Milner Gibson, died unmarried in 1921 and bequeathed most of the family portraits to the Borough of St. Edmundsbury. Tissot’s portrait of Miss Sydney Milner-Gibson, valued at £1.8 million, is on display at Moyse’s Hall Museum as part of a display in the Edwardson Room first floor gallery in an exhibit on Victorian costume.

Note:* Previously, scholars reported that Sydney Milner-Gibson died of tuberculosis. However, a copy of Sydney’s death certificate was sent to me by reader Adam Mead of Bristol, U.K. Adam blogs on the Milner-Gibson family at https://milnergibson.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/the-milner-gibsons/. Thank you, Adam!

Portrait de M…B (Portrait of Mrs. B, Mrs. Thomas Gibson Bowles, 1876). (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

In late 1875, Tommy Bowles married Jessica Evans Gordon (1852 – 1887). Her father, Major-General Charles Evans Gordon, was Governor of the Royal Victoria Military Hospital Netley, the largest military hospital in its day with 138 wards housing about one thousand beds. In the year following their marriage, Tissot made an informal portrait of her wearing her morning cap. After Jessica’s death at 35, Tommy wrote, “So bright and joyous, so gentle and gracious a spirit as hers…She was as near perfect wife and mother as may be.”

Chichester Parkinson-Fortescue, 1st Baron Carlingford (1823-1898), by James Tissot (1871). Oil on canvas, 74 ½ by 47 ½ in. (189.2 by 120.7 cm). University of Oxford. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Frances, Countess Waldegrave (1821 – 1879) was an influential Liberal Society hostess whose fourth and final husband was Chichester Fortescue (1823 –1898), an Irish MP, who became Lord Carlingford. Tissot may have met her through John Everett Millais, who frequented her salons. She shared Tissot’s interest in spiritualism and painting, and at some point, Tissot painted her portrait in her boudoir. The portrait, whereabouts unknown, was not considered a good likeness.

In 1871 – shortly after Tissot had fled Paris – the charming and “irresistible” Countess Waldegrave pulled strings to get Tissot a lucrative commission to paint a full-length portrait of Fortescue, which was funded by a group of eighty-one Irishmen including forty-nine MPs, five Roman Catholic bishops and twenty-seven peers to commemorate his term as Chief Secretary for Ireland under Gladstone – as a present to his wife. The portrait was given to the University of Oxford by sitter’s nephew, Francis Fortescue Urquhart (1868-1934), Fellow of Balliol College, about 1904. It was re-hung in the North School in 1957.

Tea (1872), by James Tissot. Oil on wood, 26 by 18 7/8 in. (66 by 47.9 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

Tissot’s great friend, Edgar Degas owned a pencil study for his 1872 painting, Tea. One of Tissot’s eighteenth-century costume paintings, it was calculated to appeal to British collectors once he had moved to London in mid-1871, following the Franco-Prussian War and its bloody aftermath, the Paris Commune.

Louise Jopling (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

British painter Louise Jopling (1843 – 1933) had lived in Paris from 1865 to 1869, when her ne’er-do-well husband, Frank Romer, was sent packing by his employer, Baron de Rothschild. Louise had been painting with the encouragement of the Baroness, a watercolor artist, and once living
in London, Louise continued painting despite numerous hardships. Her work was exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibitions after 1870, and she met “that extraordinarily clever French artist, James Tissot,” when his
picture, Too Early, “made a great sensation” at the 1873 exhibition. Tissot gave her a sketch of Gravesend he made that year. In her 1925 autobiography, Louise wrote of him, “James Tissot was a charming man, very handsome, extraordinarily like the Duke [then, Prince] of Teck. He was always well groomed, and had nothing of artistic carelessness either in his dress or demeanor. At one time he was very hospitable, and delightful were the dinners he gave. But these ceased when he became absorbed in a grande passion with a married woman who, to his great grief, died after he had known her but a brief time.”

Portrait of Algernon Moses Marsden (1877), by James Tissot. 19 by 29 in./48.26 by 73.66 cm. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

Algernon Moses Marsden (1847 – 1920) was a more colorful character than James Tissot’s urbane portrait of him suggests. [To learn more about him, see Who was Algernon Moses Marsden?] He may have been Tissot’s picture dealer for a short time, though there is no information on any of Tissot’s paintings that Marsden may have sold. But Tissot’s In the Conservatory (Rivals), c. 1875, a masterpiece that was deaccessioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art at Christie’s, New York in October, 2013 [see For sale: In the Conservatory (Rivals), c. 1875, by James Tissot], is listed in the auction catalogue as having originally been “(probably) with Algernon Moses Marsden, London.” The catalogue suggests that Marsden modeled for one of the figures in this painting: “The dark-haired young man with moustache in the teatime scene looks very similar to Marsden, whose portrait Tissot painted in 1877.” Marsden poses in the elegant new studio of Tissot’s home in St. John’s Wood [the setting often is erroneously identified as Marsden’s study]. This portrait, just a bit larger than Tissot’s 1870 portrait of Gus Burnaby, remained in the Marsden family for nearly a century. Algernon Marsden at age 30 appears sophisticated and well-to-do, but he was a high-living scoundrel. Tissot’s portrait, which captures the man in his moment of youth and apparent success, was sold at Sotheby’s, London in 1971 for $4,838/£2,000. In 1983, it was sold at Christie’s, London for $65,677/£45,000. [Hammer prices.]

Algernon Moses Marsden’s aunt – Julia White, was married to Edward Fox White, of 13 Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead, who was a “dealer in works of art.” Tissot’s portrait of him [measuring 29 by 21 in. (73.66 by 53.34 cm); click here and scroll down to see it, http://tonyseymour.com/pages/gomes-silva] was passed down through the family until 1988, when it was sold at Sotheby’s for £50,000/$ 92,205 (Hammer price).

Tissot gave A Civic Procession Descending Ludgate Hill, London (c. 1879, oil on canvas, 84.5 by 43 in./214.6 by 109.2 cm), previously called The Lord Mayor’s Show, to Léonce Bénédite, the Curator of the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris. The painting was purchased by the Corporaton of London through S.C. L’Expertise, Paris, from the curator’s granddaughter, Mme. Léonce Bénédite, in 1972 and is now in the collection of the Guildhall Art Gallery. It is not currently on view, but see James Tissot’s “A Civic Procession” (c. 1879).

Study for “Le Sphinx” (Woman in an Interior, c. 1885), by James Tissot. Oil on panel, 43 3/4 by 27 in. (111.1 by 68.6 cm). Private Collection. (Photo: Wiki)

Around 1885, Tissot gave Study for ‘Le Sphinx’ (Woman in an Interior) to Léonce Bénédite.

This image from TIssot’s La Femme à Paris series, which remained with the Bénédite family until it was sold around 1972, actually was a portrait of Louise Riesener (1860 – 1944). The same year, Tissot planned to marry Mlle. Riesener, the granddaughter of portrait painter Henri Riesener (1767 – 1828), a daughter of the painter Léon Riesener (1808-1878), and a cousin of painter Eugène Delacroix (1798 – 1863). Along with her sister Rosalie, she belonged to the same artistic social set as Berthe Morisot, for whom they modeled.

Unfortunately, one day when the forty-nine-year-old Tissot removed his overcoat in the front hall, his appearance struck his twenty-five-year-old fiancée as old-fashioned. Louise suddenly decided that she had lost her desire to marry.

In 2005, Study for “Le Sphinx” sold at Sotheby’s, New York for $ 650,000 USD/£ 364,023 GBP (Hammer price).

July (Speciman of a Portrait, c. 1878), by James Tissot. Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. Image courtesy of www.jamestissot.org

July (Speciman of a Portrait, 1878), by James Tissot. Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. Image courtesy of http://www.jamestissot.org

Tissot exhibited July (Speciman of a Portrait), along with nine other paintings, at London’s Grosvenor Gallery – a sumptuous, invitation-only showcase for contemporary art in New Bond Street – in 1878, the year it was painted. The painting is one in a series representing months of the year, and the figure is modeled by Tissot’s mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton (1854 – 1882). The setting for July was the Royal Albion Hotel near the shore of Viking Bay in Ramsgate, a seaside resort on the Kent coast, seventy-eight miles southeast of London. At some point, another artist painted a frizzy red hairstyle (probably considered more up-to-date) on Kathleen Newton; In 1980, this original version was donated to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio at the bequest of Noah L. Butkin.

Tissot had painted a copy, showing Kathleen Newton wearing a tight blonde bun. Tissot gave this version of the painting to Emile Simon, administrator of the Théâtre l’Ambigu-Comique at 2, Boulevard Saint Martin, Paris from 1882 to 1884. Simon sold it as La Réverie in the five-day sale of his collection at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in 1905. In 2002, this version of Seaside (also known as July, La Réverie, or Ramsgate Harbour), signed and inscribed: “J.J. Tissot a l’am(i) E. Simon en bon Souvenir” (on the horizontal bar of the window frame), was sold at Christie’s, London for $ 2,161,740 USD/£ 1,400,000 GBP (Hammer price).

Portrait of Mlle. L.L. (Young Lady in a Red Jacket) (February 1864), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 48 13/16 by 39 3/8 in. (124 by 99.5 cm.) Museé d’Orsay, Paris. (Photo: Wikipaintings)

Other art experts whose collections included a Tissot oil painting include the wife of Paris Temps art critic M. Thiébault-Sisson. Mme. Thiébault-Sisson sold Tissot’s lovely Portrait of Mademoiselle L. L. (1864) at a Paris auction in 1907. The picture is now on display at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

L’Ambitieuse (The Political Woman, 1883-1885), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 73 1/2 by 56 by 5 in. (186.69 by 142.24 by 12.7 cm). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Tissot’s L’Ambitieuse (1883-1885), or The Political Woman, was owned by the American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase (1849 –1916). In 1909, Chase donated the painting to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. It is not on view.

The articles published on this blog are copyrighted by Lucy Paquette. An article or any portion of it may not be reproduced in any medium or transmitted in any form, electronic or mechanical, without the author’s permission. You are welcome to cite or quote from an article provided you give full acknowledgement to the author.

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From Princess to Plutocrat: Tissot’s Patrons

To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “From Princess to Plutocrat: Tissot’s Patrons.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/from-princess-to-plutocrat-tissots-patrons/. <Date viewed.>

The story of James Tissot’s patrons is the story of social transition: in the late nineteenth century, art collecting ceased to be the prerogative of the aristocracy and became a status symbol for the new class of wealthy industrialists.

The Marquis and the Marquise de Miramon and their Children (1865), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 69 11/16 by 85 7/16 in. (177 by 217 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Tissot moved to Paris from the seaport of Nantes in 1856 (before he turned 20 on October 15 of that year), to study art. He lived in rented rooms in the crowded Latin Quarter and made his début at the Salon in 1859. By 1865, Tissot was earning 70,000 francs a year, and had found his entrée to aristocratic patronage with The Marquis and the Marchioness of Miramon and their children [René de Cassagne de Beaufort, marquis de Miramon (1835 – 1882) and his wife, née Thérèse Feuillant (1836 – 1912), with their first two children, Geneviève (1863 – 1924) and Léon (1861 – 1884) on the terrace of the château de Paulhac in Auvergne]. The portrait of the Marquis and Marchioness of Miramon and their children remained in the family until 2006, when it was acquired by the Musée d’Orsay. When exhibited in Paris in 1866, this painting served as Tissot’s calling card to the lucrative market for Society portraiture.

Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née, Thérèse Feuillant (1866), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, unframed: 50 1/2 by 30 3/8 in. (128.3 by 77.2 cm). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

By 1866, Tissot’s oil portraits included dapper, upper-class gentlemen, attractive and well-dressed ladies of leisure, and a wealthy-looking boy of 12 or so wearing knee breeches and red and white diced Scottish hose. Most stunning was his Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon, née Thérèse Feuillant, in her sitting room at the château de Paulhac in Auvergne. Tissot wrote to her husband, who had commissioned the portrait, asking permission to display her portrait at the 1867 Paris International Exhibition. The J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, California, acquired the picture from the family in 2007.

In 1866 – at age 30 – Tissot won the right to exhibit anything he wished at the Salons.

Busy with commissions from his aristocratic patrons, he bought property to build a mansion in the avenue de l’Impératrice (Empress Avenue, now avenue Foch), Baron Haussmann’s magnificent new boulevard linking the Place de l’Etoile and the park grounds at the Bois de Boulogne.

Portrait of Eugène Coppens de Fontenay (1867), by James Tissot. 27 by 15 in. (68.58 by 38.10 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo courtesy the-athenaeum.org

While his house was under construction, Tissot painted Portrait of Eugène Coppens de Fontenay (1824 –1896), the president of the exclusive Jockey Club in Paris. Married in 1853, Eugène Aimé Nicolas Coppens de Fontenay had three children.

Portrait of Eugène Coppens de Fontenay remained in the family until 1971, when it was sold at Christie’s, London for $ 4,352 USD/£1,800 GBP. It was purchased by the City of Philadelphia in 1972 and is on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Circle of the Rue Royale (1868), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 68 7/8 by 110 5/8 in. (175 by 281 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Tissot moved into his elegant new villa by 1868, and he furnished it in lavish Second Empire taste, forming a collection of Chinese and Japanese art for which he became renowned, and which he featured in many of his paintings. That year, he painted a hearty slice of the French aristocracy in a group portrait, The Circle of the Rue Royale (1868). Members of this exclusive club, founded in 1852, each paid Tissot a sitting fee of 1,000 francs. He portrayed them on a balcony of the Hôtel de Coislin overlooking the Place de la Concorde (if you look closely at the original painting, you can see the horse traffic through the balustrade). From left to right: Count Alfred de La Tour Maubourg (1834-1891), Marquis Alfred du Lau d’Allemans (1833-1919), Count Étienne de Ganay (1833-1903), Captain Coleraine Vansittart (1833-1886), Marquis René de Miramon (1835-1882), Count Julien de Rochechouart (1828-1897), Baron Rodolphe Hottinguer (1835-1920; he kept the painting according to the agreed-upon drawing of lots), Marquis Charles-Alexandre de Ganay (1803-1881), Baron Gaston de Saint-Maurice (1831-1905), Prince Edmond de Polignac (1834-1901), Marquis Gaston de Galliffet (1830-1909) and Charles Haas (1833-1902). The Musée d’Orsay acquired The Circle of the Rue Royale in 2011 from Baron Hottinguer’s descendants.

Beating the Retreat in the Tuileries Gardens (1867), by James Tissot. (Photo: Wikipaintings.org)

Princess Mathilde Bonaparte. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

At the Paris Salon in 1868, Tissot exhibited two oil paintings, one of which, Beating the Retreat in the Tuileries Gardens, was purchased by Napoléon III’s influential cousin, Princess Mathilde. Mathilde was an artist herself and had won a medal at the Salon in 1865.

Meanwhile, the rising industrial class was beginning to invest in art.

Tissot exhibited Le confessional (Leaving the Confessional, 1865), an oil painting, at the Salon in 1866 when he was 30, still living in student lodgings in the Latin Quarter while gaining recognition and success in Paris. A watercolor version, which is smaller but otherwise virtually identical to the original oil, was commissioned in 1867 by American grain merchant and liquor wholesaler William Thompson Walters (1819 – 1894). Upon his death, his son and fellow art collector Henry Walters (1848 – 1931), inherited his father’s collection and bequeathed it to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland at his death. Tissot’s watercolor, The Confessional, is not on view.

The Confessional (c. 1867), by James Tissot. Watercolor, 10 3/8 by 5 11/16 in. (26.4 by 14.4 cm). Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Other collectors of James Tissot’s paintings in the United States included: Massachusetts shipper and banker Alvin Adams (1804 – 1877); New York lawyer Robert Livingston Cutting (1836 – 1894); Pennsylvania dry goods merchant, woolens manufacturer and financier Thomas Dolan (1834 – 1914); Pennsylvania banker, real estate developer and distiller Henry C. Gibson (1830 – 1891); and New York lawyer and judge Henry Hilton (1824 – 1899).

After the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71, and the bloody Commune uprising in Paris in the spring of 1871, Tissot moved to London. Within two years, he had established himself in a large house with a studio, a conservatory and a luxurious garden in St. John’s Wood. While British aristocrats did not purchase his paintings, plenty of newly-wealthy businessmen sought his work as they enhanced their social status by building art collections. Because provenance (the history of ownership) of Old Masters paintings was not always meticulously documented at this time, many new collectors – wary of fakes – concentrated on contemporary artists so they would know exactly what they were getting for their money.

On the Thames, A Heron (c. 1871-1872) is one of Tissot’s first paintings after his arrival in London – and it was the first on record to be sold at auction in England. Calculated to appeal to Victorian tastes, this Japanese-influenced scene initially was owned by London banker José de Murrieta, a member of a prominent Spanish family. Murrieta tried to sell the painting on May 24, 1873 as On the Thames: the frightened heron; priced at 570 guineas, it did not find a buyer. His brother, Antonio de Murrieta, attempted and failed to sell it on June 15, 1873 for 260 guineas. As The Heron, the painting was sold at Sotheby’s, New York in 1973 for $ 32,000 USD/£ 12,886 GBP. On the Thames, A Heron was the gift of collector Mrs. Patrick Butler, by exchange, to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and is on display.

In 1883, At the Rifle Range (1869) was offered for sale by one of the de Murrieta brothers at Christie’s, London as The Crack Shot, for £220.10s but failed to find a buyer at that price. It was purchased by Captain Bambridge in 1937 at the Leicester Galleries in London. Captain George Bambridge (1892 – 1943), a British diplomat, was married to Rudyard Kipling’s daughter, Elsie (1896 – 1976). From 1938, the childless couple resided at Wimpole Hall, about 8½ miles (14 kilometres) southwest of Cambridge. Since Elsie Bambridge’s death in 1976, the estate has been owned by the National Trust and is open to the public.

Les Adieux was reproduced as a steel engraving by John Ballin and published by Pilgeram and Lefèvre in 1873 – an indication of its popularity. The picture was owned by wealthy international railway contractor Charles Waring (c. 1827 – 1887). After his death, it was sold for 220 guineas at Christie’s, London to the father of Lt. Col. P.L.E. Walker, from whom it was purchased by the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery in 1955.

Tissot’s The Last Evening was purchased from Agnew’s, a London art dealership that specialized in “high-class modern paintings,” by Charles Gassiot (1826 – 1902), a London wine merchant and art patron who lived in a mansion in Upper Tooting, Surrey. Gassiot bought The Last Evening in February, 1873, before it was exhibited at the Royal Academy, for £1,000. He and his wife Georgiana, a childless couple, donated a number of his paintings, including The Last Evening, to the Guildhall Art Gallery from 1895 to 1902. This picture is currently on view. Gassiot also purchased Tissot’s Too Early, from Agnew’s in March, 1873 (before its exhibition at the Royal Academy that year), for £1,155. Gassiot bequeathed it to the Guildhall Art Gallery, where it is on view for visitors.

Tissot sold La Visite au Navire to Agnew’s, London, in mid-June 1873. Less than five months later, at the beginning of November, Agnew’s, Liverpool sold the painting to art collector David Jardine (c.1826 – 1911) of Highlea, Beaconsfield Road, Woolton. Jardine, a timber broker and ship owner, was the head of Farnworth & Jardine, world famous for their mahogany auctions; a man of considerable ability and courtesy, he was well liked for his “courtly bearing.” Incidentally, this picture, purchased from the Leicester Galleries, London by William Hulme Lever, 2^nd Lord Leverhulme, in 1933, was sold as A Visit to the Yacht following a sale at Sotheby’s, London on December 4, 2013. A buyer in the United States purchased the picture for a price within the estimated £2 to 3 million GBP it was expected to bring at the auction. [See For sale: A Visit to the Yacht, c. 1873, by James Tissot]

The Ball on Shipboard (c. 1874) was purchased from Tissot by London art dealer William Agnew (1825 – 1910), the year it was completed and sold to Hilton Philipson (1834 – 1904), a solicitor and colliery owner living at Tynemouth. (Philipson also spent 620 guineas at Agnew’s for John Everett Millais’ 1874 painting, The Picture of Health, a portrait of Millais’ daughter, Alice (later Mrs. Charles Stuart Wortley). The Ball on Shipboard, which has been in the collection of the Tate since 1937, is not on display.

In 1874, James Tissot sold paintings to two aristocrats: the exiled Empress of France, widow of Napoléon III, Eugénie de Montijo (1826 –1920), and Irish peer Mervyn Wingfield, 7th Viscount Powerscourt (1836 – 1904). Lord Powerscourt, whose forebears had lived since 1300 on a magnificent estate outside Enniskerry, County Wicklow, Ireland, paid £1,000 for Avant le Départ (private collection). Later, by autumn, Tissot was commissioned to paint a double portrait, The Empress Eugénie and the Prince Impérial in the Grounds at Camden Place, Chislehurst (c. 1874, Musée Nationale du Château de Compiègne, France). After this, Tissot’s paintings continued to be purchased primarily by industrialists [though in the late 1880s, he executed pastel portraits of some aristocratic women].

Chrysanthemums (c. 1874-76) was purchased by British cotton magnate, MP and contemporary art collector Edward Hermon (1822 – 1881) by 1877. Hermon eventually owned over 70 paintings, including works by J.M.W. Turner, Sir Edwin Landseer, and John Everett Millais, which he displayed in the picture gallery of his magnificent French Gothic estate, Wyfold Court, built at Rotherfield Peppard, Oxfordshire between 1872 and 1878. Chrysanthemums was purchased by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute at Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1994.

Portrait of Mrs Catherine Smith Gill and Two of her Children (1877), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas; 60.04 by 39.96 in. (152.5 by 101.5 cm). Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Mr. Chapple Gill (c.1833 – 1901/2), was the son of Robert Gill, a Liverpool cotton broker of Knotty Cross and R. & C. Gill; the son joined the business in 1857 and had risen to senior partner [by 1880, he became head of the firm]. In 1877, he commissioned French painter Tissot, then living in London, to paint a portrait of his wife, Catherine Smith Carey (1847-1916), whom he had married on June 10, 1868 at Childwall. She was the only child of Thomas Carey (1809 – c. 1875), a wealthy, retired estate agent. Tissot’s portrait of Catherine Smith Gill shows her – heiress at age 30 – sitting in the drawing-room window of her mother’s home at Lower Lee, at Woolton near Liverpool, which was built by Catherine’s father. The portrait was purchased from Berkeley Chapple Gill, grandson of Mrs. Gill – the son of the little boy in the painting – in 1979, and it remains on view at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Click here for an interactive view of it, and compare this 1877 Victorian family portrait to Portrait of the Marquis and Marchioness of Miramon and their children, which was considered a very modern, informal family portrait in Paris in 1865.

Kaye Knowles, Esq. (1835-1886), was a London banker whose vast wealth came from shares in his family’s Lancashire coal mining business, Andrew Knowles and Sons. Knowles, a client of London art dealer Algernon Moses Marsden [1848-1920, see Who was Algernon Moses Marsden?], owned a large art collection, including works by Sir Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Rosa Bonheur, Giuseppe De Nittis, Atkinson Grimshaw and Édouard Detaille. He eventually owned four oil paintings by James Tissot, including The Empress Eugénie and the Prince Impérial in the Grounds at Camden Place, Chislehurst; On the Thames (1876, The Hepworth Wakefield Art Gallery, Wakefield, West Yorkshire); and In the Conservatory (also known as Rivals, c. 1875-1876, private collection). Incidentally, after Knowles’ sudden death, In the Conservatory (Rivals) was sold with his estate as Afternoon Tea by Christie’s, London, on May 14, 1887. William Agnew (1825 – 1910), the most influential art dealer in London – who represented Tissot for a time during the 1870s – bought the painting at this sale for 50 guineas and passed it to one of Kaye’s executors, his brother, Andrew Knowles, on May 16, 1887. It recently was deaccessioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. [See For sale: In the Conservatory (Rivals), c. 1875, by James Tissot]

Andrew Knowles also owned Tissot’s The Convalescent (1875/1876), which was exhibited at the 1876 Royal Academy exhibition. In the collection of Museums Sheffield since 1949, it is not currently on view.

Portsmouth Dockyard (c. 1877) originally was owned by Henry Jump (1820 – 1893), a wealthy Justice of the Peace and corn merchant living at Gateacre, Lancashire. It has been in the collection of the Tate since 1941 and is not currently on display.

Bad News (The Parting, 1872), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas, 68.6 by 91.4 cm. National Museum Cardiff. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

William Menelaus (1818 – 1882) was a Scottish-born engineer, iron and steel manufacturer, and inventor. Widowed after only ten weeks of marriage, he never remarried but raised two nephews (William Darling, who became a law lord, and Charles Darling, who became an MP and later a baron). Menelaus earned a fortune at the Dowlais Ironworks in South Wales, and his only extravagance was his art collection, which was said to fill his home in Merthyr. He donated pieces to the Cardiff Free Library, then upon his death, bequeathed to it the remaining thirty-six paintings, valued at £10,000. His bequest, which included James Tissot’s Bad News (The Parting), painted in 1872, is now in the collection of the National Museum Cardiff. Bad News (The Parting) is displayed in Gallery 6, Level 4.

Quiet (c. 1881) was purchased by Richard Donkin, M.P. (1836 – 1919), an English shipowner who was elected Member of Parliament for the newly created constituency of Tynemouth in the 1885 general election. The small painting remained in the family and was a major discovery of a Tissot work when it appeared on the market in 1993, selling for $ 416,220/£ 280,000. In perfect condition, it shows Tissot’s mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton (1854 – 1882), and her niece, Lilian Hervey in the garden of Tissot’s house at 17 Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood, in north London. It was Lilian Hervey who, in 1946, publicly identified the model long known only as “La Mystérieuse” – the Mystery Woman – as her aunt, Kathleen Newton.

Related blog posts:

The high life, 1868: Tissot, his villa & The Circle of the Rue Royale

James Tissot’s brilliant marketing tool, 1869

James Tissot’s house at St. John’s Wood, London

A spotlight on Tissot at the Met’s “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity”