James Tissot

James Tissot, born in the port city of Nantes in western France, began studying art in Paris in the mid-1850s and successfully exhibited at the Salon throughout the 1860s. The aftermath of Franco-Prussian War (in which Tissot participated) and the Commune government (ruling briefly in 1871) left Paris a changed and depleted city, so in 1871, Tissot departed for London. There he found his way into social and artistic circles that allowed him to build a career, taking fashionable society life and leisure activities as his principal subjects. All this changed following a religious experience Tissot had around 1884, shortly after the death from tuberculosis of Kathleen Newton, who had been his companion since the mid-1870s. Suffering deep grief, Tissot returned to France and developed a strong bent for spiritualism and religious subjects. For the remainder of his working years, Tissot produced illustrations based on the Life of Christ and the Old Testament; these works took their place in the Catholic revival that gathered force in France at the end of the nineteenth century.