(Over 500 related drawings, watercolors and oils are now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.)Īfter this he turned to the scenes of the Old Testament, upon which he was still engaged at the abbey of Buillon, in the department of Doubs, France, when he died. They were then published by the firm of Lemercier in Paris, who had paid him 1,100,000 francs for them. In 1896 the series of 350 drawings of incidents in the life of Christ was exhibited in Paris, and the following year found them on show in London. He disappeared from Paris, whither he had returned after the death of Kathleen Newton, and went to Palestine. It was many years before he turned to the chief labor of his careerthe production of a series of 700 water-color drawings to illustrate the life of Christ and the Old Testament. Newton moved into Tissot's household in 1876 and lived with him until her suicide in the late stages of consumption in 1882 at the age of 28. Kathleen Newton, who became his companion and the model for many of his paintings. Sometime in the 1870s Tissot met a divorcee, Mrs. Here he studied etching with Sir Seymour Haden, drew caricatures for Vanity Fair, and painted portraits as well as genre subjects. He fought in the Franco-German War, and, falling under suspicion as a Communist, left Paris for London. Demi-mondaine would be more accurate as a description of the series of studies which he called La Femme a Paris. His first characteristic period made him a painter of the charms of women. In 1861 he showed The Meeting of Faust and Marguerite, which was purchased by the state for the Luxembourg Gallery. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris under Ingres, Flandrin and Lamothe, and exhibited in the Paris Salon for the first time at the age of twenty-three. James Joseph Jacques Tissot was born at Nantes.

James Tissot by Melissa E. Buron