Marguerite a' L' Office

(James Jacques Joseph Tissot)

The young woman depicted in this painting, with distraught expression and anxiously clasped hands, is Marguerite, the tragic heroine of Goethe’s play Faust and the opera based on it by Charles Gounod (1818-1893). She has been seduced by Faust with the help of Mephistopheles (the Devil). Sitting now in church, by a choir screen behind which mass is being celebrated by tonsured monks, Marguerite is hearing the voice of Mephistopheles telling her that she is going to Hell. In the opera the choir sing ‘Dies irae’ – ‘Day of Wrath’ or Last Judgement – and Marguerite declares she is doomed. Below the painting’s title in the 1861 Paris Salon catalogue the artist added, to make sure that viewers would understand the picture’s meaning, ‘Le choeur: Dies irae, dies illa…’, Marguerite: ‘Que suis-je loin d’ici!’
This important work was one of six paintings accepted for exhibition in 1861 by the Paris Salon jury that had been submitted by James Tissot (1836-1902), a young pupil of Hippolyte Flandrin (1809- 1864) and Louis Lamothe (1822-1869). Born in Nantes and christened Jacques Joseph, he was called James from a young age, and after Jesuit schooling had gone to study art in Paris. He recorded his first picture sales in 1857, and in 1859 exhibited work for the first time at the Paris Salon, which at that time took place every two years. In 1860 he sold three paintings with Marguerite subjects to the leading Parisian art dealer, Adolphe Goupil. These, like three of his 1861 Salon exhibits, were clearly inspired by the heroine of Charles Gounod’s opera, Faust, which had opened at the Théâtre Lyrique, Paris, in 1859. Based on the 1808 play of the same name by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749- 1832), who called his heroine Gretchen, the French opera focused on the tragic love story of Marguerite with Faust, an ageing philosopher who had made a pact with Mephistopheles for youth in return for his soul. Mephistopheles helps Faust to seduce Marguerite, an innocent young maiden whom Faust first approaches as she is leaving church after mass. The largest of Tissot’s 1861 Salon pictures, Rencontre de Faust et de Marguerite (1860; Musée d’Orsay, Paris), depicted this encounter, and was bought by the French state for 5,000 francs. Another 1861 exhibit, Faust et Marguerite au jardin (1861; private collection), showed the next episode in the story, with the pair of lovers seated in a garden, Marguerite holding a namesake daisy and counting its white petals in the well-known phrase, ‘He loves me, he loves me not…’, after which the seduction took place. Third of the Marguerite pictures at the 1861 Salon was Marguerite à l’office, presenting the heroine as a fallen woman, repentant and seeking God’s forgiveness.

Tissot emphasises Marguerite’s transgression and consequent suffering by placing her beneath, and with her back to, a large crucifix with an emaciated and twisted body of the dead or dying Christ. His skeletal feet, through which a large nail is driven, are level with the top of her head, and her face aligns with votive candles beneath the cross, evoking prayers. Christ’s head is drooping, seemingly weighed down by a spiked metal crown, and a cluster round His neck of heart-shaped ex-votos in precious metal. A bright red alms box beneath the crucifix, and another on the right of the painting – in Marguerite’s line of sight and below a notice saying ‘Fur die Armen’ (For the Poor) – are reminders of the call on Christians to make sacrifices as atonement for sin. Heroic sacrifice of past generations, and the family honour that Marguerite has negated, are underlined in the stained glass window depicting St George, and the memorials to its left comprising helms and shields of deceased knights.
Marguerite’s estrangement from Christ through sin is made clear by her physical separation from the celebration of mass, taking place on the other side of the choir screen. There is a glimpse of the priest’s back, dominated by an image of the crucified Christ on his chasuble. Above him, over the altar, is a Pieta painting, with the body of the dead Christ held by angels in front of his mother Mary.
Christ’s suffering and death on the cross was to save sinful humanity, including Marguerite; her sin has been a cause of His agony. That she herself is suffering mental anguish is clear from her troubled expression, and the way that she is clasping and intertwining her fingers, a sign of anxiety and stress.

Marguerite is dressed in clothes styled on sixteenth-century Flemish and German fashions, which were broadly classed as ‘medieval’ in Tissot’s time. He was emulating the history paintings of the Belgian artist Henri Leys (1815-1869), which had been much admired at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris. One of Tissot’s other Marguerite pictures copies the pose and clothing of a figure in paintings by Leys. Tissot would have been able to borrow theatrical costumes for models to wear, and also could have had items made up to his designs, based on images of historic dress. He studied the work of Northern Renaissance artists, in particular Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8- 1543) and Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), both for costumes and accessories, and for their meticulously detailed painting style. The nineteenth-century German ‘Nazarene’ and British ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ artists took inspiration from similar sources, and some critics classed Tissot’s medieval-dress pictures as ‘Pre-Raphaelite’. The crucified Christ in Marguerite à l’ Office recalls Holbein’s Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521; Kunstmuseum, Basle), which Tissot would have seen on a brief tour in 1859 when he also visited Leys.

A photograph of Marguerite à l’office, taken by Robert Bingham and published by him in 1862 (and included in one of Tissot’s photograph albums published by Willard Misfeldt), lacks the prominent signature and date of the oil currently for sale; the floor tiles are also slightly different. The photograph may record the same painting before Tissot added his signature, or it may record an unlocated replica. Tissot painted many replicas – almost exactly similar versions of pictures – in response to demand. His use here of the most expensive support available – cradled mahogany panel (acajou parqueté) – indicates that the work currently for sale was almost certainly Tissot’s 1861 Salon picture; its companion Rencontre also uses the same type of support. The prominent dating and signature in large red lettering likewise accord with the other Marguerite paintings Tissot exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1861. Tissot is known to have painted at least ten pictures on the subject of Faust and Marguerite, seven of them focused on Marguerite alone. Marguerite à l’Office has been only been known in modern times through Bingham’s black-and-white photograph. The reappearance of Tissot’s oil painting shows it to be an eloquent masterpiece of subtle colouring and atmosphere.

Credit: Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz

Sold by Tissot in 1861 as ‘Marguerite a’ l’eglise (assise)’ for 2,500 francs to Leon Say (1826-1896);
Acquired by the former owner at an unknown date, circa 1960-1970.

Frederick, Margaretta S., ‘Love, Error, and Repentance’: The Faust and marguerite Paintings’, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, James Tissot (San Francisco/ Munich, London, New York, 2019) pp. 29-31 and 317-318;

Gautier, Theophile, Abecedaire de Salon de 1861 (Paris, 1861), p.341;

Labourdette, Anne, ‘James Tissot et la photographie’ Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, James Tissot et ses Maitres (Nantes, 2005), pp.95 and 107;

Matyjaszkiewicz, Krystyna, ‘Tissot’s Sales Notebook’, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, James Tissot (San Francisco/ Munich, London, New York, 2019),pp. 270 and 334, n.36-37;

Misfeldt, Willard E., The Albums of James Tissot (Bowling Green, 1982), p.16, no. I-12;

Perrin, Paul, ‘Archaismes’, Musee d’ Orsay, Paris, James Tissot, l’ambigu moderne (Paris, 2020)pp. 30-31;

Wentworth, Michael, James Tissot (Oxford, 1984), p.22,29,32-25,67,199, and pl. 5.

Paris Salon, 1861 no. 2971 as ‘Marguerite a’ l’office’;

Paris Exposition Universelle, Exposition Centennale de l’art francais, no. 626, as ‘Marguerite a’ l’ office’, oil, ‘Salon 1861’, lent by M. Leon Say.