Tuesday, June 12, 2012

James Jacques Joseph Tissot

James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836-1902), although a French national, spent most of his working life in England and his paintings are wonderful depictions of life in Victorian England.

A Little Nimrod (ca. 1882)

 A Woman of Ambition (1883-85)

 At the Window 
[doesn't it look like this young lady is talking on a cell phone?]

 Captain Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1870)
[who was Frederick Gustavus Burnaby? find out here]

During the Service (Martin Luther's Doubts) (1860)

 Emigrants (ca. 1873)

 Faust and Marguerite in the Garden (1861)

 A Fete Day at Brighton (1875-78)

About the next painting, Laura Cumming, in an article on an exhibition of "Art in the Age of Steam," has this to say:
But the single clinching image of this new sense of time and motion is James Tissot's Gentleman in a Railway Carriage, in which a prosperous, fur-collared gent holds fast to a strap as the train rushes on, the view through the window a blur. On his knee is an open timetable, in his hand a fob watch and he flashes the viewer a knowing look as if we were also checking progress. Halfway between portrait and archetype, this is the very essence, as a contemporary critic put it, 'of Nineteenth-Century Man'.
 Gentleman in a Railway Carriage (1872)

Goodbye on the Mersey (1881)

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