Monday 23 July 2012

Woman At The Well Painting

Source:- Google.com.pk
Woman At The Well Painting Biography
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (15 October 1836 - 8 August 1902) was a French painter, who spent much of his career in Britain.
Contents  [hide]
1 Early life
2 Early career
3 Mature career
4 Late career
5 See also
6 Gallery
7 References
8 External links
[edit]Early life

Tissot was born on October 15, 1836 to a family of Italian descent in the port town of Nantes, France. His father, Marcel Théodore Tissot, was a successful drapery merchant while his mother, Marie Durand, assisted her husband in his business and designed hats. His mother was also a devout Catholic and instilled pious devotion in Tissot from a very young age. It is widely believed that Tissot's youth spent in Nantes contributed to his frequent depiction of shipping vessels and boats in his later works. Also, there was most likely an influence of his parents' involvement in the fashion industry on his attention to women's clothing over the course of his career. By the time Tissot was 17 he knew he wanted to pursue painting as a career. Though his father did not support this decision, they eventually were able to overcome the disagreement.
[edit]Early career

In 1856 or 1857, Tissot travelled to Paris to pursue an education in art. While staying with a friend of his mother, painter Elie Delaunay, Tissot enrolled to study in the studios of Hippolyte Flandrin and Louis Lamothe, both successful Lyonnaise painters who came to Paris to study under Ingres. Lamothe provided a majority of Tissot's studio education, while he studied on his own as most other artist of time by copying works at the Louvre. Around this time, Tissot also made the acquaintance of James McNeill Whistler as well as Edgar Degas (who had also been a student of Lamothe and a friend of Delaunay) and Édouard Manet.
Tissot exhibited in the Paris Salon for the first time in 1859, where he showed five paintings of scenes from the Middle Ages, many depicting scenes from Goethe's Faust. These works show the influence of the Belgian painter Henri Leys (Jan August Hendrik Leys), whom Tissot had met in Antwerp in 1859, over his work.
[edit]Mature career

In about 1863, Tissot suddenly shifted his focus from the medieval style to the depiction of modern life through portraits. During this period, Tissot found himself held in high critical acclaim, quickly becoming a successful artist. Like contemporaries such as Alfred Stevens and Claude Monet, Tissot also explored japonisme, including Japanese objects and costumes in his pictures. A portrait of Tissot by Degas from these years (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) shows him with a Japanese screen hanging on the wall. [1]


On the Thames
Tissot fought in the Franco-Prussian War as part of the improvised defense of Paris, joining two companies of the Garde Nationale and later as part Paris Commune. Either because of the political associations caused by the latter (which he was believed to have joined to protect his own belongings), or simply because of better opportunities, he left Paris for London in 1871. Having already worked as a caricaturist for Thomas Gibson Bowles, the owner of the magazine Vanity Fair, as well as exhibited at the Royal Academy, Tissot arrived with established social and artistic connections in London. Bowles gave Tissot both a place to stay as well as a cartooning job for "Vanity Fair". He quickly developed his reputation as a painter of elegantly dressed women shown in scenes of fashionable life. By 1872, Tissot was able to purchase his own home in St John's Wood, an area of London very popular with artists at the time. In 1874, Degas asked him to join them in the first exhibition organized by the artists we call the Impressionists, but Tissot refused. He continued to be close to the artists however. Berthe Morisot visited him in London in 1874 and he traveled to Venice with Edouard Manet at about the same time. He also saw Whistler regularly. In 1875-6, Tissot met an Irish divorcee named Mrs. Kathleen Newton, who became the painter's companion and frequent model. Newton gave birth to a a son, Cecil George Newton in 1876, who is believed to be Tissot's son. She moved into Tissot's household in St. John's Wood in 1876 and stayed there until her death in the late stages of consumption in 1882. Tissot would frequently refer to these years with Newton as the happiest of his life, a time when he was able to live out his dream of a family life.[2]
After Kathleen Newton's death, Tissot returned to Paris. A major exhibition of his work took place in 1885 at the Galerie Sedelmeyer, where he showed 15 large paintings in a series called La Femme à Paris. Unlike the genre scenes of fashionable women he painted in London, these paintings represent different types and classes of women, shown in their professional and social contexts. The works suggest the influence of Japanese prints in their use of unexpected angles and framing, as well as a monumental context shown in the size of the canvases.
[edit]Late career

In 1885, Tissot experienced a re-conversion to Catholicism, which led him to spend the rest of his life illustrating the Bible. Many of his artist friends were skeptical about his conversion, as it conveniently coincided with the French Catholic revival, a reaction against the secular attitude of the French Third Republic. To assist in his completion of biblical illustrations, Tissot traveled to the Middle East in 1886, 1889, and 1896 to make studies of the landscape and people. His series of 365 gouache illustrations showing the life of Christ were shown to critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences in Paris (1894-5), London (1896) and New York (1898-9), before being bought by the Brooklyn Museum in 1900.[3] They were published in a French edition in 1896–7 and in an English one in 1897-8 bringing Tissot vast wealth and fame. Tissot spent the last years of his life working on paintings of subjects from the Old Testament (Jewish Museum, New York).[4] Although he never completed the series, he exhibited 80 of them in Paris in 1901 and engravings after them were published in 1904. Tissot died in Doubs, France on August 8th, 1902, while living in the Château de Buillon, which he had inherited from his father in 1888. [5]
Woman At The Well Painting
Woman At The Well Painting
Woman At The Well Painting
Woman At The Well Painting
Woman At The Well Painting
Woman At The Well Painting
Woman At The Well Painting
Woman At The Well Painting
Woman At The Well Painting
Woman At The Well
The Woman At The Well: A Picture Of Grace, A Picture Of Us (excerpt)

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