Tragic love left Jacques Tissot's life on hold

A major exhibition of Tissot's works is on display in Auckland this week. T.J. McNAMARA profiles the French artist's life and loves.

Still on Top, the painting stolen from the City Gallery, damaged and now restored, will go on display this week after three years' absence, along with other works by Tissot borrowed for the occasion.

The incomparable portrayer of English Victorian social life was French, born Jacques Joseph Tissot, in Nantes in 1836, though he preferred to be called James.

This was not the only paradox about his life and work. He was a friend of revolutionary artists such as Degas and Manet but took no part in the controversial Impressionist exhibitions.

Unlike these bohemians, he was a worldly success and made immense amounts of money from his art. He loved to paint women but he never married.

He was profoundly religious but his life was dominated by a grand affair with a married woman, Mrs Kathleen Newton, an Irishwoman with a past, who became the model featured in many of his paintings.

Still on Top is typical of the paintings that brought him fame. He had a fascination with flags and kept a store of them in his studio. The flags in the Auckland Gallery painting also feature in his single most famous and reproduced work, The Ball on Shipboard, now in the Tate Gallery in London.

The other delightful feature of the Auckland picture is the wonderful painting of the women's dresses. Like the flags, the striped dress in Still on Top is used in a number of paintings.



Early in his career, which began in Paris, Tissot painted historical costume pieces but then turned to scenes of contemporary Parisian life. After the Franco-Prussian War and playing a mysterious part in the politics of the Commune that followed, he left for London, almost penniless.

His paintings there, such as Too Early, which, amusingly, showed people arriving before time at a society ball, were an immediate success and he moved into a house in fashionable St Johns Wood.

Edmond de Goncourt satirically described how iced champagne was always available for visitors and clients, and the garden where a footman was employed to shine the leaves of the shrubbery.

Tissot's lover Kathleen had been shipped out to India by her parents as a teenager for an arranged marriage with a surgeon, Dr Isaac Newton.

On board ship she had a brief affair which she confessed to Newton immediately after their marriage. Newton demanded a divorce and Kathleen returned to England.

When she met Tissot she had two children whose parentage was uncertain, though they took the name Newton. They moved into Tissot's house and remained there until Kathleen's death.

By setting up house with a divorcee, Tissot cut himself off from respectable Victorian society but he seemed quite happy to have made the sacrifice. Kathleen was the great love of his life, but she had tuberculosis. She died on November 8, 1882, at the age of only 28.

Within five days of her death, Tissot abandoned his house and fled to Paris. One painting, The Garden Bench, which showed Mrs Newton, her children and her niece, Tissot kept until his death.

He resumed painting Parisian life but his heart was not in it. He returned to the Catholicism of his youth and his later paintings were all religious.

He visited Jerusalem several times and finally lived in the country in his father's house. He lived so quietly that he was rumoured to have become a monk.

After a short period when his society pictures were mocked by the avant-garde of Bloomsbury, he is now recognised as one of the outstanding painters of the 19th century. Auckland is lucky to have such a splendid example of his work.

* Tissot: Still on Top from July 12 to October 14, Auckland Art Gallery.