The association between two plants, holly and ivy, with the feast of Christmas appears peculiarly British, and best expressed in the traditional carol The Holly and the Ivy. Apparently, holly has been a symbolic reference to Jesus Christ since the Middle Ages, now explained by its red berries representing the drops of blood of the crucifixion, and the crown of thorns worn by Jesus. Ivy then forms a symbolic reference to Christ’s mother, the Virgin Mary.

This is seen in cameo in two paintings by British artists of the nineteenth century.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted a couple of works on and about Christmas, of which A Christmas Carol from 1867 is probably the more interesting. His model is Ellen Smith, described as a ‘laundry girl’, who is dressed in items from the artist’s collection. There are several allusions to Christmas, particularly the Virgin and Child just above the model’s face, and a sprig of holly with its red berries at the end of her musical instrument.

Sophie Gengembre Anderson’s undated Christmas Time – Here’s The Gobbler! includes a larger spray of holly on the wall at the top right.

Otherwise, holly is only exceptionally identifiable in paintings, and the only reference I have found is in a single work by James Tissot, where it appears together with ivy, but not in reference to Christmas.

Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London following the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune. This couple, separated by the iron rails of a closed gate, are in late eighteenth century dress. The man stares intently at the woman, his gloved left hand resting on the spikes along the top of the gate, and his ungloved right hand grasps her left. She plays idly with her clothing with her other hand, and looks down, towards their hands.

Reading her clothing, she is plainly dressed, implying she is perhaps a governess. A pair of scissors suspended by string on her left side would fit with that, and they’re also symbols of the parting taking place. This is reinforced by the autumn season, and dead leaves at the lower edge of the canvas. However, there is some hope if its floral symbols are accurate: ivy in the lower left is indicative of fidelity and marriage, while holly at the right invokes hope and passion.

Ivy has longer and more extensive traditions throughout European painting, although it too is only exceptionally identifiable.

In mythology, a thyrsus or thyrsos is a form of staff or even spear decorated with plant matter. In its strictest form, it should be a wand made from the giant fennel plant, decorated with ivy leaves and tipped with a pine cone or artichoke. It’s almost invariably an attribute of the god Dionysus (Roman Bacchus), and his devotees, maenads or bacchantes. It’s thus associated with prosperity, fertility and their over-indulgence in the form of hedonism. In the extreme, it can be tipped with a metal point and used as a club.

Annibale Carracci’s Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne (1597-1602) is a marvellous fresco on a ceiling in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Dionysus is sat in his chariot with his thyrsus, here a long staff wound with ivy leaves but without any tip. Although a feature of many other paintings, this is one of very few decorated with ivy.

Ivy also makes an appearance in a not dissimilar painting with open narrative, this time by Philip Hermogenes Calderon in 1856.

Calderon’s Broken Vows is an early ‘problem picture’. A beautiful young woman, displaying her wedding ring, stands with her eyes closed, clutching a symbolic ‘heart’ area on her chest to indicate that her love life is in trouble. On the ground near the hem of her dress is a discarded necklace or ‘charm’ bracelet. The ivy-covered wall behind her would normally indicate lasting love, which was her aspiration.

A set of initials are carved on the fence, and on the other side a young man holds a small red flower in front of his forehead, which a young woman is trying to grasp with her right hand. The wooden fence appears tatty, and has holes in it indicating its more transient nature, and affording glimpses of the couple behind, but only tantalisingly small sections of their faces.

Calderon here deliberately introduces considerable ambiguity. The eyes of the shorter person behind the fence are carefully occluded, leaving their gender open to speculation. Most viewers are likely to conclude that the taller figure behind the fence is the unfaithful husband of the woman in front, but that requires making assumptions that aren’t supported by visual clues. Whose vows are being broken? Calderon invites us to speculate.

Like laurel, ivy can also be worked into a crown.

Francisco Pradilla’s watercolour of A Flute Player Crowned with Ivy is a delightful example from 1880. But it took Pierre Puvis de Chavannes to envisage ivy being used instead of a length of rope.

In Puvis’ Fantasy from 1866, one of the two people in this idyllic wooded landscape is using a length of ivy to school a winged white horse, either Pegasus or a hippogriff.

Although seldom clearly identifiable in landscape paintings of trees, one of Paul Nash’s last conventional landscapes is an exception.

Oxenbridge Pond from 1927-28 shows a pond at Oxenbridge Farmhouse, Iden, not far from the artist’s home. Patterns of brushstrokes are assembled into the textures of foliage, ivy covering a tree-trunk, even the lichens and moss on the trunk closest to the viewer, at the right edge.

Reference

Wikipedia on the carol The Holly and the Ivy.

When the French painter James Tissot arrived in London in the summer of 1871, he had just a hundred francs to his name, and had left his reputation behind. He was soon earning more than enough to pay the bills, through his paintings of elegant women in fashionable scenes. He also resumed his narrative series, embarking on his first set in a tavern on the bank of the River Thames in London, probably in Rotherhithe or Wapping.

The first of those to be exhibited was An Interesting Story from about 1872, which set the pattern. It’s the late eighteenth century, and an old soldier is telling one (or more) pretty young women interminable and incomprehensible stories about his military career, with the aid of charts spread out on the table. In this case, the word interesting is ironic to everyone except the veteran.

In The Tedious Story (c 1872), there can be no doubt the young woman has drifted off into a world of her own, one far away from the veteran’s charts.

Tissot moved the exterior location further up-river for his Bad News (The Parting) (1872). The soldier is now young, and has just been recalled to duty, to leave the two young women who appear as heartbroken as he does. In the centre of the painting, a small boat full of uniformed soldiers is in transit, presumably coming to take this soldier away with them. He again returns to the enduring theme of loss and separation.

In contrast, Too Early (1873) is an insightful social comedy: this group has arrived at the soirée on time, when social convention is always to be late, so you aren’t the first to arrive. The four guests are embarrassed, and don’t know what to do, so they stand prominently in the middle of the empty floor while the hostess prepares the musicians, and the host waits idly at the door.

The first of the four paintings in his series The Prodigal Son in Modern Life, The Departure (c 1882) is set in another of his favourite waterside haunts along the Thames. The windows are now grimy, and the light filtered through the smoke of the city. Father, an elderly man, sits giving his younger son advice, having filled that son’s wallet with his share of inheritance. Bags are already packed and ready to go, and under the table a kitten seems to be leaving its litter too. Behind the younger son, one petal has fallen from the vase of nasturtiums. To the left, the older son stares with disappointed disinterest out towards the river. A sister (or perhaps the older brother’s wife) looks up from her sewing towards father and son.

The next two paintings take the younger son out to Japan, for clear allusions to immoral conduct, then to the prodigal son’s return on board a ship carrying pigs and cattle.

The final painting, The Fatted Calf (c 1882), shows the prodigal son sharpening a knife for carving the roast joint of meat concealed under the silver platter on the table. The older brother has just climbed up from a boat on the river, where his friends remain, and is arguing with their father as to why his younger brother should be welcomed back with a ‘fatted calf’. There are other cues carefully placed in this painting: climbing on the trellis are nasturtiums, the flowers securely clustered together again. The mother strokes a dog, a symbol of fidelity, and the prodigal son appears to have gained a pretty female partner too.

This series was first exhibited as the centrepiece of his one-man exhibition in the Dudley Gallery, London, in 1882. He finally won a gold medal for it at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889.

In the middle of the 1870s, Tissot had begun an intimate relationship with his Irish model, Kathleen Newton. She was a divorcee with a family of her own, but his Catholic faith was a barrier to their marriage. She developed tuberculosis in about 1880, and died in his arms in late 1882. He moved back to Paris, where he painted his largest series yet, fifteen canvases on the theme of the Woman of Paris.

Women of Sport (The Amateur Circus) from 1883-5 must be among the strangest of this set, here showing many ‘modern women’ being entertained by scantily clad male trapeze artists.

In 1885, Tissot re-discovered his Catholic faith, and embarked on the most ambitious project of his career, to paint the whole of the life of Jesus Christ in more than 350 gouache paintings. This coincided with some experiments with the spirit world, and efforts to contact his dead partner.

Over the next decade, Tissot travelled to research locations and details of the period, and started this enormous task. In the spring of 1894, 270 of his paintings were exhibited in Paris to massive public acclaim. This show visited London in 1896, and toured America in 1898. The whole series of 350 paintings was then published, first in Paris then overseas, in a series of editions lasting until 1910. Critical views were mixed at best, but this was the greatest commercial success of Tissot’s career.

Despite the sheer effort and quantity involved, many of his images are innovative and artistic rather than being simply illustrative. Above is his account of Jesus Goes Up Alone onto a Mountain to Pray, and below is his provocative view of What Our Lord Saw from the Cross. His originals are now in the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

In his final years, Tissot worked on a series showing scenes from the Old Testament, of which he had completed almost a hundred when he died suddenly in 1902. Within a year, his paintings had collapsed in value, and by the 1920s he had been largely forgotten.

References

Wikipedia.

English translation of Tissot’ book, fully illustrated: volume 1, volume 2.

Dolkart JF (ed) (2009) James Tissot, the Life of Christ, Brooklyn Museum and Merrell. ISBN 978 1 8589 4496 8.
Marshall NR & Warner M (1999) James Tissot, Victorian Life / Modern Love, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08173 2.
Wood C (1986) Tissot, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978 0 297 79475 2.

If you want to see fine paintings, visit more provincial galleries. While they don’t have many van Goghs, Rembrandts or Vermeers, you will have the chance to see some of the best paintings by artists whose work isn’t as overvalued. This weekend I look at a small selection of narrative works by the Anglo-French artist James Tissot, a contemporary of the Impressionists. Since his death in 1902, his work initially fell into deep disfavour, but in the late twentieth century became more popular again.

Jacques Joseph Tissot was born in the busy port of Nantes, in the north-west of France, in 1836. His father was a prosperous draper there, dealing daily with women’s fashions and apparel. The young Tissot resolved to become a painter when he was seventeen, but it took a further three years before he could persuade his family to allow him to study in Paris. He had also become an Anglophile, and adopted the name of James at about that time.

In Paris, he first stayed with a family friend, the painter Élie Delaunay (1828-1891), and studied under Hippolyte Flandrin briefly, and for several years under Louis Lamothe, both former pupils of JAD Ingres. Although Lamothe’s work is now forgotten, he also taught Edgar Degas, and ensured Tissot’s technical brilliance. The young Tissot also became friends with Whistler, Degas, and Manet. His first successful submission to the Salon was in 1859, when he was fascinated by the Middle Ages.

His Dance of Death or the Way of Flowers, Way of Tears was among his paintings exhibited at the Salon in 1860, and one of that series based on the Middle Ages.

At this time, he started a series of scenes based on Goethe’s Faust. In this he was influenced by another largely forgotten painter, the Belgian Baron Henri Leys (1815-1869). Tissot loved this historical romanticism, which was also becoming popular in the work of Delaroche, Gérôme, Ingres, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Britain.

The best-known painting of the introduction of Gretchen into Goethe’s play is that by James Tissot in the Musée d’Orsay. I haven’t been able to locate an image of that work, Faust Meets Marguerite, from 1860, but above is his signed study for it.

He continued with this carefully executed view of Faust and Marguerite in the Garden (1861), shown here in its finished version, also in the Musée d’Orsay. The couple are sat talking together on a bench, still quite distant, with Gretchen looking intently at a daisy she’s holding.

This scene from Act 4 of Faust, Marguerite in Church (c 1861) shows her cast in the role of the penitent Magdalene, a theme that Tissot was to revisit in his later paintings of the life of Christ. Two innocent children kneel in front of a shrine, praying in the normal and obvious manner. Marguerite’s inner turmoil cannot bring her any closer to that shrine, or even to break herself out of her posture of dejection, eyes cast down, hands apart rather than held together in prayer. Above her is a painting of the Last Judgement, anticipating her own fate in Act 5.

Tissot’s explorations of Faust reached their climax in about 1861, and he next painted a series of much-admired works based on the theme of the prodigal son. These are derived from the parable related by Jesus, told in the Gospel of Luke chapter 15 verses 11-32. This shows the scene most popular among artists of all ages, The Return of the Prodigal Son (1862).

He then abandoned formal narrative painting and started to paint scenes from modern life. By the end of the 1860s, though, life in Paris was clearly changing for the worse, when he painted this young woman practising her skills with firearms At the Rifle Range (1869).

Tissot’s life changed dramatically with the Franco-Prussian War that followed in 1870. He served in the National Guard in the defence of Paris, following which he may have become involved in the Commune, perhaps to protect his own property. When the Commune was suppressed, Tissot fled to London, where he arrived in June 1871 with just a hundred francs to his name.

Tissot painted The Farewells soon after his flight to London that summer. This couple, separated by the iron rails of a closed gate, are in late eighteenth century dress. The man stares intently at the woman, his gloved left hand resting on the spikes along the top of the gate, and his ungloved right hand grasps her left. She plays idly with her clothing with her other hand, and looks down, towards their hands.

Reading her clothing, she is plainly dressed, implying she was a governess, perhaps. A pair of scissors suspended by string on her left side would fit with that, and they’re also symbols of the parting taking place. This is reinforced by the autumn season, and dead leaves at the lower edge of the canvas. However, there is some hope if the floral symbols are accurate: ivy in the lower left is indicative of fidelity and marriage, while holly at the right invokes hope and passion.

In tomorrow’s article, I will show how his art flourished in England.

References

Wikipedia.

English translation of Tissot’s Life of Christ, fully illustrated: volume 1, volume 2.

Dolkart JF (ed) (2009) James Tissot, the Life of Christ, Brooklyn Museum and Merrell. ISBN 978 1 8589 4496 8.
Marshall NR & Warner M (1999) James Tissot, Victorian Life / Modern Love, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 08173 2.
Wood C (1986) Tissot, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978 0 297 79475 2.

The revival of paintings of interiors in the middle of the nineteenth century flourished in several ways. For some, it was an opportunity to reveal their studio, and perhaps provide the viewer with a little insight into the artist. For others it was a way to recreate interiors of the past, or to deliver open-ended narrative.

The Painter and His Model (1855) shows one of Alfred Stevens’ young and fashionable models leaning over his shoulder, as he works on her portrait.

Stevens was an early enthusiast for the Japonisme that swept Paris. Insights into his life such as his The Psyché (My Studio) (c 1871) repay closer reading. The French word psyché refers to the full-length mirror seen in this apparently informal view of Stevens’ studio, the name deriving from the legend of Cupid and Psyche.

For this painting, Stevens doesn’t actually use a proper psyché, but has mounted a large mirror on his easel, perhaps to suggest that art is a reflection of life. A Japanese silk garment is draped over the mirror to limit its view to the model, breaking up her form in an unnatural way. At the lower right, the artist indicates his presence with a cigarette, and there is a small parrot who might imitate his speech. The studio is littered with Japanese prints and the artist’s canvases, and one painting on the wall is a study for his early What They Call Vagrancy, lacking most of its figures.

Léon Frédéric’s extraordinary Studio Interior from 1882 appears to be a fantasy self-portrait of the artist naked with a skeleton on his lap. The latter has been dressed up in undergarments with a long starry veil over them. His palette and brushes are at the lower right, and his clothes, including a top hat, are draped on chairs.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sunday Morning from about 1871 goes back to the interior of a house in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. The mistress of the house has just had a baby, and her midwife is holding that baby as she looks out into the daylight. This is a smaller version of a previous painting by Alma-Tadema titled A Birth Chamber, Seventeenth Century (1868), that extended the view to include the mother in bed.

The Music Room, painted by Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate in 1871 using oils, shows the fine quality of his conservative oil paintings. It’s worth bearing in mind that at this time the French Impressionists had already established their very different style, and this work is more typical of paintings from a century earlier. While this music room features a couple singing to the accompaniment of the piano, and there are musical instruments in the centre foreground, everyone else in the room is engaged in decidedly non-musical activities.

In 1872, James Tissot embarked on a series of paintings and engravings set in a tavern on the bank of the River Thames in London, probably in Rotherhithe or Wapping. The first to be exhibited was his An Interesting Story (c 1872). It’s the late 1700s, and an old soldier is telling one or more pretty young women interminable and incomprehensible stories about his military career, with the aid of charts spread out on the table. Here, the story is dubbed ‘interesting’ in irony.

Edgar Degas painted A Cotton Office in New Orleans in 1873, when he visited his mother’s family in New Orleans. It features several family portraits, and has a narrative background, showing a cotton buyer visiting the Musson cotton merchants. The elderly gentleman wearing a top hat, in the foreground, is Michel Musson, Degas’ uncle, and a partner in the business. Edgar Degas’ brothers Achille and René are slightly further back on the left (leaning idly against the open window), and sat reading a newspaper, respectively. Standing at the desk on the right is John Lavaudais, the cashier. The figures echo and repeat one another across and into the depths of the room, in dress, posture, and appearance.

While almost everyone else in the painting is lounging around, business is being transacted between the buyer and broker on either side of the table covered with the cotton, the broker being at the centre of the canvas. This small pool of commerce within an image dominated by idleness and dolce far niente reflects the situation of Degas and his family at the time.

At about the same time in New York, the American genre artist Eastman Johnson painted a narrative work that only makes any sense when you know its title of Not at Home (c 1873), showing the interior of the artist’s home. Without those three words of the title, all you see is a well-lit and empty parlour, and the presumed mistress of the house starting up the stairs, in relative gloom in the foreground. At the right is a child’s push-chair, parked up and empty.

Those three words, of course, are the classic excuse offered in someone’s absence – “I am sorry, but the Mistress is not at home” – even when they are very much at home, but simply don’t want to see the visitor. So the title could imply that the woman is ascending the stairs in order not to see visitors. Or, if we know that this is the artist’s home, could it be that it’s Johnson himself who’s not at home?

Interiors don’t have to be domestic, as demonstrated by Louis Béroud’s early Staircase of the Opéra Garnier from 1877.

At about this time, Nordic artists started to realise the potential of interiors as explorations of light, led by the work of Harriet Backer.

Avskjeden (The Farewell) (1878) was probably Backer’s first really successful painting. It shows a grown daughter, left of centre, bidding farewell to her family as she leaves home. Backer probably painted this from her own emotional experience, as her father died in 1877, and she had informed her mother that she didn’t intend returning home, but to pursue her painting career instead.

When she travelled to France, her style began to loosen up: another early success was her Solitude (c 1880), her first painting accepted for the Salon in 1880. This was one of her first interiors featuring limited light, whose play was to become a dominant theme in her art.

Backer’s Blue Interiør from 1883 develops the theme of the play of light from the window on the person and contents of the interior of the room. Here the composition is complicated by the presence of a large mirror at the left.