Imagine the large exhibition that the Musée d'Orsay is devoting to James Tissot: it was hung, ready to be inaugurated, when the museum closed. Open, it would have revealed to visitors this artist friend of Degas, painter of elegant life in British parks, portraitist of good society, Proustian observer of balls where we arrive too early, inventor of a pictorial "small talk" fashionable at the time of impressionism. The fantasy would be to enter it today, armed with Balzac's cane - which made it invisible, according to his friend Delphine de Girardin - in the Paris of general confinement. Tissot's paintings would take on another color: all of his characters resemble us these days, they are as if locked up.
Hide and Seek shows children playing hide and seek in an apartment with heavy curtains, the members of the Cercle de la rue Royale wait on their balcony as if they were not allowed to go for a walk on avenue du Bois, convalescents
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