Although biblical paintings by artists such as Mihály Munkácsy, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret and Henry Ossawa Tanner also achieved significant popularity subsequently, the “Tissot Bible” represents the peak of popularity for an approach to painting biblical scenes which first gained significant traction with the historical paintings of Benjamin West before achieving greater popularity in the Victoria era with artists such as John Martin, the Pre-Raphaelites and Gustave Doré.
Tom Ardill has noted that British artists in the early 1800s ‘believed that the national school was at a considerable disadvantage compared to other European countries owing to the historical antipathy of the Church of England towards imagery in churches.’[i] This argument ‘came to a head following the purchase by the British Institution of Benjamin West’s Christ Healing the Sick in 1811’ leading to hopes for a new era of British ecclesiastical art being raised ‘as the British Institution began purchasing, and awarding prizes for, history paintings with sacred subjects.’
Ardill states that: ‘This was not, however, to be the turning point for the patronage of ecclesiastical art in Britain, but rather a short-lived high-water mark. The first efforts of the directors to place paintings in churches were frustrated when their offer of Mary Anointing [by James Hilton] to St James’s Piccadilly was blocked by William Howley, the Bishop of London. There was no room for a painting above the altar, and Howley feared that if it were “once permitted” to place a picture elsewhere in the building “churches will probably become in time Exhibitions of Paintings rather than places of Worship.” In the following year, the directors turned their attention from scriptural to military subjects, dedicating their prize funds to commemorations of Waterloo.
From 1814, the focus for religious art shifted away from the Academy as artists, led by Benjamin West and followed by Benjamin Robert Haydon, John Bryant Lane, and others, began exhibiting ever larger scriptural paintings in independent exhibitions. Rather than being installed in churches and other public buildings, these works were toured around the country, until the novelty wore off.’
These arguments and activity did, in time, have an effect. In 1761 Thomas Wilson edited and contributed to William Hole’s important Ornaments of Churches Considered, a book about the decoration of St Margaret Westminster which helped mark a new interest in introducing visual art among Anglicans. Wilson and Hole quoted approvingly the following: ‘As ornament and instruction are all we contend for, I should prefer large historical paintings to single figures, and this the more willingly, because adoration has at no time, nor in any place, been paid to them.’ Wilson followed this direction himself with the commissioning in 1776 of a very large painted altarpiece, made by Benjamin West for the east window of the church and depicting Devout Men Taking the Body of St Stephen.
President of the Royal Academy from 1792 until his death, West received many commissions from George III and other English patrons. He worked primarily as a painter of historical and religious subjects, and as a portrait painter as patronage required. In the 1770's West subject matter began to include the religious themes that dominated his work of the late 1770's and 1780's. Most notable were his paintings on the progress of Revealed Religion for the Royal Chapel and designs for stained glass for St. Georges Chapel, both at Windsor Castle. John Dillenberger notes that, for history painters like West, ‘greater faithfulness to new archaeological knowledge’ gave a sense of ‘authentic fascination and enchantment’.[ii]
In the late 1810s and 1820s John Martin built a huge audience for his spectacular paintings of biblical catastrophes and vast landscape scenery. The large paintings that Martin showed in the major London art exhibitions in this period moved and astonished nineteenth-century viewers from all social classes making his reputation as the master of a new kind of spectacular popular art. His pictures served as a form of blockbuster entertainment, but he never achieved the official validation he desired with critics attacking what they saw as his bombastic and repetitive style of painting. Dillenberger suggests that the history painting of Martin, West, James Barry and Henry Fuseli eventually fell out of fashion as, ‘stylistically and conceptually, the artists’ imagination did not take them beyond fairly literal, dramatic if not histrionic renderings’. For a time, Dillenberger argues, West’s paintings made ‘historical paintings serve a new romantic consciousness’ and thereby gave hope of an ultimately unrealised, at that point, future for religious painting.
Susanna Avery-Quash and Jeffrey Richards have noted the way in which critics such as Anna Jameson and John Ruskin then ‘played a hugely significant role in spreading an understanding of the development of Christian art in ways acceptable to a British and largely Protestant audience.’[iii] The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and William Holman Hunt in particular, put their recommendations for a Protestant art into practice. Holman Hunt’s version of Pre-Raphaelitism sought to combine naturalistic detail, historical accuracy, and sublime symbolism in a single embrace.
Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World gave rise to much popular devotion in the late Victorian period with engraved reproductions being widely hung in nurseries, schools and church buildings. Toward the end of his life Holman Hunt painted a larger, life-size, version, begun about 1900 and completed in 1904, which was purchased by shipowner and social reformer Charles Booth and hung in St Paul's Cathedral, London, where it was dedicated in 1908 after a 1905–07 world tour where the picture drew large crowds.
This picture tour followed wildly popular tours of Tissot’s Life of Christ illustrations, including a North American tour. Holman Hunt claimed to have influenced Tissot, including in his biography details of a meeting with Tissot during a gathering at John Everett Millais’ studio. Tissot, on being told that Hunt had just returned from Jerusalem, said that he admired Hunt’s The Finding of Christ in the Temple and his principle of work so much that he had resolved someday to go to the East and paint on the same system.
Lucy Paquette notes that Tissot’s ‘highly lucrative Bible illustrations’ were researched ‘in Palestine after a “spiritual awakening” in 1885’ and ‘published to worldwide acclaim in 1896 and 1897’. ‘This series of 365 gouache illustrations for the Life of Christ were shown to wildly enthusiastic crowds in Paris (1894 and 1895), London (1896) and New York (1898), after which they toured North America until 1900, bringing in $100,000 in entrance fees; the Brooklyn Museum then acquired them by public subscription for $60,000.’ ‘After Tissot’s death in 1902, his assistants completed his Old Testament project, which was published in 1904.’[iv]
Tissot’s spiritual awakening followed a love affair in London with the young divorcée Kathleen Newton, who became his model and muse. After her tragic premature death, he returned to Paris and spent long periods of productive retreat at his family estate in the French countryside, nurturing a growing, deep commitment to religion.
As was popular during the late 19th century, Tissot dabbled in mysticism and attended Spiritualist séances. His famous mezzotint from the Fine Arts Museums’ collection, The Apparition (1885), depicts the ghost of Kathleen Newton with a spirit guide as they reportedly appeared to Tissot during a séance. This work and the painting on which it is based—long thought to be lost or destroyed until it was rediscovered in the course of researching this project—are both on view in James Tissot: Fashion & Faith.
Tissot’s career spanned the English Channel, garnering commercial and critical success both in London and Paris. James Tissot: Fashion & Faith includes many key modern-life works from his time in London and Paris, such as The Ball on Shipboard (1874), London Visitors (ca. 1874), Holyday (also known as The Picnic; 1876), The Prodigal Son in Modern Life suite (1882), and examples from the La Femme à Paris series (1883–1885). The exhibition provides new perspectives on where and how Tissot should be considered in the 19th-century canon.
New scholarship has recently shed light on the final 20 years of his career when he made those three trips to the Holy Land and produced hundreds of watercolours to illustrate the Bible. A selection of images from this series is included in the exhibition, on loan from the Brooklyn Museum and the Jewish Museum, New York.
In embarking of this series Tissot's renewed embrace of religion would have been an important motivation. The influence of Holman Hunt may also have been a factor, but, as Petra Chu notes, ‘the artist cannot have been oblivious to the enormous success of similar projects, most notably the famous Doré Bible (1865–1866), featuring illustrations by the French illustrator Gustave Doré.’[v] ‘This illustrated bible had been produced not only in folio and various smaller-size formats, but also in many languages. Moreover, the illustrations, without text, were published in so-called Doré Gallery editions, which were enormously popular.’
Tissot's project was ‘deliberately different from Doré's,’ as he ‘countered the Romantic fantasy of Doré's imagery’ with a verism, which was ‘based on his trips to the Holy Land, where he made countless preliminary drawings and probably photographs’ believing that the Holy land was essentially ‘unchanged since the birth of Christ.’
The popularity of nineteenth century religious art led to its use in ‘popular religious visual culture, such as mass and prayer cards, illustrations of catechisms, religious calendars, and embroidery patterns’ resulting eventually in its dismissal by art critics. Chu argues that art historians have now come to realize that ‘more than an endless and mindless rehash of Italian Renaissance and Baroque models … nineteenth-century religious art is part of a broad and varied production of visual culture … that … cannot be separated from the most important theological effort of the nineteenth century, the critical investigation of the life of Jesus.’
Hélène Valance, writing in Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit, sums up the era-bound of nineteenth century religious painting when she suggests that, although archaeological exploration of the Holy Land and philological research on the holy texts had developed a “scientific” approach to the origins of Christianity, such additional information did not bring later nineteenth century believers closer to solving the ultimate mysteries of religion’ and, ‘in a society where mechanical reproduction had begun to secularize images, depicting miracles could seem incongruous.’[vi]
The best religious art of the period oscillates between verism and romanticism with both ultimately creating images expressive of mindsets set within and rarely transcending nineteenth century understandings of naturalism in religion and art.
James Tissot: Fashion & Faith, Legion of Honor, October 12, 2019 - February 9, 2020
[i] https://chronicle250.com/1813
[ii] J. Dillenberger, Benjamin West: The Context of His Life's Work, Trinity University Press, San Antonio (1977)
[iii] https://19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.832/
[iv] Paquette, Lucy. “James Tissot and the Pre-Raphaelites.” The Hammock. https://thehammocknovel.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/james-tissot-and-the-pre-raphaelites/.
[v] http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring10/james-tissot
[vi] Anna O. Marley ed., Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit, University of California Press, 2012
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Beth Rowley - So Sublime.
