To cite this article: Paquette, Lucy. “James Tissot’s “Chrysanthemums” (1877).” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2020/09/14/james-tissots-chrysanthemums-1877/. <Date viewed.>
As the weather turns autumnal, the home and garden shops display mums – chrysanthemums. The mums so familiar to us in the fall are hardy but unexciting, just something to add a spot of color to our gardens in place of the daffodils, peonies, irises, lilies, and roses that we’ve enjoyed in earlier months. Mums are, admit it, a bit boring – now. But they have an illustrious history.
Above: Detail, Chrysanthemums and Cabbage (c. 1486 or before), by Tao Cheng (Chinese, active c. 1471–after 1502). Handscroll, ink and slight color on paper. Cleveland Museum of Art.
Chrysanthemums were cultivated in China as a flowering medicinal herb as early as the fifteenth century B.C. Chinese scholars prized the flowers as a symbol of nobility and integrity, and in traditional Chinese medicine, the “Queen of the East” could ease fever, headache, cough, and dizziness, improve swollen or dry eyes and blurred vision, and inhibit aging and prolong life. Chrysanthemum flowers can be brewed for a rich, flavorful, and refreshing tea.
The chrysanthemum was introduced into Japan in the eighth century A.D., and the Emperor adopted the flower, thought to be refined and elegant, as his official emblem. In English the Imperial Throne of Japan is referred to as the Chrysanthemum Throne. The chrysanthemum has been a traditional motif in Japanese art and poetry.
Chrysanthemums were brought to Europe in the seventeenth century, during the feudal military government of Japan during the Tokugawa shogunate, from 1600 to 1868. During this period, most foreigners were banned. Under the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan experienced rapid economic growth and urbanization, which led to the rise of a prosperous merchant class and a leisured, pleasure-seeking urban culture, or Ukiyo.
With the signing of the first commercial treaty between Japan and America in 1854, more than two hundred years of Japanese seclusion came to an end.
At the 1862 London International Exhibition, the retired first British Minister to Japan, Sir Rutherford Alcock (1809-1897) showed his collection at his Japanese Pavilion. The exotic Japanese treasures – handcrafted pottery, lacquer, bamboo and ivory – were a sensation.
Left: Chrysanthemums (mid 1600s), by Kitagawa Sōsetsu (Japanese, active 1639-50). Hanging scroll. Cleveland Museum of Art.
Above: Three Yoshiwara women at a chrysanthemum show (1766). Woodcut print. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Above: Chrysanthemums and Horsefly (c. 1833-1834), by Katsushika Hokusai. Woodblock print. Minneapolis Institute of Art.
One of the most dazzling exhibits at the 1867 Paris International Exposition was the Japanese Pavilion, and it received more visitors than any other exhibit. This was the first World’s Fair in which Japan participated. The Japanese Imperial Commission to the Exposition was led by fourteen-year-old Prince Tokugawa Akitake (1853-1910), a younger brother of the man who would be the last Shogun under Japan’s feudal regime. The delegation arrived in Paris in March 1867, and one year later, James Tissot was appointed gwa-gaku, or drawing master, to Prince Akitake.
Prince Akitake, who called his teacher “Chi-so,” returned to Japan in October 1868. The Tokugawa shogunate was overthrown by loyalists of the Imperial Court in the Meiji Restoration in a coup d’état in January 1868. The restoration of an absolute monarch, the Emperor of Japan, ushered in an era of modernization and industrialization which brought sweeping reforms in government, the military and the culture.
Right: A Wren and Chrysanthemums (c.1830), by Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, Tokyo (Edo) 1797–1858), Woodblock print. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Above: The everlasting chrysanthemum (Toshigiku), 1843-1847, by Utagawa Hiroshige
Polychrome woodblock print. Rhode Island School of Design Museum.
Above: Chrysanthemums (One of Twelve Album Leaves/ Flowers of the Twelve Months, 1859), by Zhang Xiong [Chang Hsiung], Chinese (1803-1886). One leaf from an album of eleven (originally twelve) leaves; ink and color on paper; with signature of the artist reading ‘Zhang Xiong.’ Harvard Art Museum.
Above: A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers (1865), by Edgar Degas. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
James Tissot was using his ever-increasing wealth to amass what would become a renowned collection of Chinese and Japanese art, vying with others including Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, James McNeill Whistler, D.G. Rossetti, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Sarah Bernhardt.
But following the Franco-Prussian War and the bloody Paris Commune, Tissot moved to London in 1871. Two years later, he bought the leasehold to a comfortable suburban villa in St. John’s Wood, west of Regent’s Park, soon adding a large studio, a glass conservatory, and an English-style garden which all provided the setting for him to continue to produce pictures often influenced by the craze for japonisme.
Above left: Vase of Chrysanthemums, by Henri Fantin-Latour (1871). Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. (Photo: Wikimedia)
Above right: Chrysanthemums in a Chinese Vase (1873), by Camille Pissarro. Oil on canvas. Private collection. (Photo: Wikiart)
Above: Chrysanthemums (1877), by James Tissot. Oil on canvas. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Chrysanthemums were introduced to England in the late eighteenth century, and their popularity grew during the second half of the nineteenth century. The blooms were available in different colors and varieties, from small pompoms to large closed globes, daisy-like flowers to wispy outspread spiders. While many painters featured them in their work, Tissot redefined such displays with a picture he exhibited at the new Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1877: Chrysanthemums. Rather than a still life, it showed a fleeting moment in a woman’s life. The Times’ critic wrote that it showed, “in particular, his great command of all the executive resources of his art.”
Tissot staged this scene by posing a model outside his conservatory, whose glass panes are visible in the top left corner of the picture. The woman in Chrysanthemums, lost in thought and preoccupied with her work in the huge bank of exuberant white, ivory, yellow, peach, orange, and pink blooms enveloping her, appears startled by the viewer. Tissot uses varied brush strokes to recreate the numerous types of chrysanthemums in his garden. The riot of color and lush textures is quite different than the annual autumn display of chrysanthemums common in the twenty-first century. Tissot’s Chrysanthemums, 1877, celebrates a flower much more exotic, sophisticated, and fascinating than it seems to us now.
Fittingly, Chrysanthemums was exhibited at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe, Japan, and at the Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, China, in 2013.
Related posts:
“The three wonders of the world”: Tissot’s japonisme,1864-67
“Chi-so”: Tissot teaches a brother of Japan’s last Shogun, 1868
James Tissot’s brilliant marketing tool, 1869
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