James Tissot was known for two things -- his immensely popular Bible illustrations and his paintings of contemporary Victorian society.
My friend Paul Zahl says that the Bible illustrations influenced the iconography of the early Hollywood Biblical epics, and he may be right, but I'm not a big fan of these works, aesthetically speaking. They're drawn in a looser, more impressionistic and decorative style than his easel paintings, and to me don't have the same power.
The easel paintings strike me as downright stunning. In them the use of an almost photographic draftsmanship and sometimes subtle but always highly dramatic evocations of spatial depth result in works that utterly enchant me.
Tissot had a number of compositional strategies for producing an impression of spatial depth. The most characteristic was the depiction of semi-enclosed spaces with portals onto wider spaces beyond, which cause the eye to come to rest momentarily in the foreground space and then to explore the background space, which reveals itself almost as a surprise, a release.
Tissot also had a knack for compositions involving larger groups in a public space, like a ballroom, in which the empty areas of the scene suggest the potential for action within it. The strategy is very explicit in the painting below, Too Early, in which the future of the evening unfolds like a ghostly vision around the few early arrivals waiting for the festivities to begin.
This is a perfect example of how visual space can be charged with emotion -- we populate the half-empty ballroom with future dancing, just as the early arrivals do . . . we enter into the emotional anticipation of these folks who've arrived a little too soon.
Tissot's genius at suggesting depth through composition and modeling also allowed him to produce canvases which shimmer with surface colors, like the canvases of the Impressionists, but almost simultaneously draw our imaginations irresistibly into the space depicted -- something the Impressionists were rarely concerned to do. The effect is magical, and one that movies would soon learn to achieve in more spectacular ways than the academic Victorian painters had at their command. Their most potent charm was appropriated, and their school of painting faded into history.
But when we look at Tissot's paintings today, when our imaginations are drawn into the spaces of his world, we can achieve a remarkable sense of intimacy with the Victorian society he observed, we can share the concerns and sometimes even the emotions of its long-vanished inhabitants . . . and there's an enchantment in that which will never fade.
