Modern or classic? Fireman or impressionist? Realistic or fake? Was it even French or English this Jacques-Joseph Tissot (1836-1902), a dandy fond of the latest fashions to the point of having renamed himself James because it is more glamorous? This beautiful Arte documentary, James Tissot, the stuff of a painter , returns on Sunday at 5:45 p.m. to the life and work of an artist truly unclassifiable and, because of this, too long neglected by the history of art.
To see them one after the other in this beautiful biography written and produced by Pascale Bouhénic, her paintings which serve the new aristocracy of the Second Empire and the Victorian era, sometimes seem wonderful, sometimes agreed. The misfires feel the sweet chromo, the application, even the plagiarism. We also discover surprises like these drawn portraits of Communards (Tissot, like Courbet, shared their cause). Or his illustrations of the Bible by which, at the end of his life, their author deepens his Catholicism in the manner of a Joris-Karl Huysmans.
Portrait of the Marquis and the Marquise de Miramon. © Herve Lewandowski / Dist - RM
The offspring of troubadour-style romanticism, a simply interesting avatar of Ingres and Delaroche, this very wealthy clothier's son prospered as a painter of Salon and great patrons. This official circuit has never prevented him from rubbing shoulders with the refused, those fullairists who were exactly contemporary with him. However, he never practiced discipline.
Could we imagine the author of the very Proustian Cercle in rue Royale crotching himself up and down the paths of the banks of the Seine like an Alfred Sisley? Among his friends and colleagues, James Tissot is first of all close to Edgar Degas. He did not reach it but took precedence in these two artists for refinement in the setting as in the expression. Culture rather than nature.
The strange charm of the arsenals
As a realistic painter, Tissot does not feel carnal love like Gustave Courbet, his Republican elder. His mastery of drawing, his dazzling know-how in the meticulous also played against him. Finally his wealth and his successes, which made him a prince among the princes, also served him: he became the opposite of the accursed artist.
But the time doing its work, it ended up finding new defenders. Cyrille Siama, new director of the Museum of Impressionism in Giverny, Paul Perrin and Marine Kisiel, curators at the Musée d'Orsay, brilliantly rehabilitate him. They invite you to taste the strange charm of boarding not for Cythera but for the smoke from the arsenals. They point to the elegant nonchalance of an attitude, the mystery of a ball seen in the midst of a schooner. They underline the quality of the rendering of a Japanese silk, the attention paid to the sumptuous creations of the fashion house Worth, the harmony of a black embroidery on the gold background of the leaves of autumn chestnut trees…
James Tissot ended his days in a place like him. At the Château de Buillon that his father had built in his region of origin, the Doubs. This neo-Renaissance style building with its Doric columns, has a ruin of Cistercian abbey, a windmill with bow windows, an aviary and a Shinto shrine.