Tissot - Christopher Wood

Tissot occupies a unique and ambivalent place in 19th-century painting: a Frenchman, he sought fame in England, and after a brilliant career as a society painter, he turned late in life to religion. He set his glittering and minutely detailed scenes in elegant London ballrooms and conservatoires and peopled them with chic young women in ravishing costumes, while at the same time investing in them a note of brooding melancholy. This became overwhelming in his many portraits of his mistress Kathleen Newton, an intensely romantic figure whom Tissot loved and painted obsessively until her tragically early death. Then, after returning to France, he experienced a dramatic religious conversion and devoted the rest of his life to spiritualism and to illustrating the Bible, which brought him even greater fame.