James Jacques Joseph Tissot

Bio

The French painter James (Jacques) Joseph Tissot began his career studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but after fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, settled in England, perhaps due to the artist’s alleged involvement in the turbulent events of the Paris Commune (1871). Tissot lived, in some style, in St John’s Wood; in 1874 Edmond de Goncourt wrote sarcastically that Tissot had “a studio with a waiting room where, at all times, there was iced champagne at the disposal of visitors, and around the studio, a garden where, all day long, one can see a footman in silk stockings brushing and shining the shrubbery leaves.” As a caricaturist for Vanity Fair, Tissot met London’s social elite and became a fashionable portrait painter, especially of elegantly dressed women, the images for which he is most renowned.