- Open today, 10 am to 5 pm.
- Parking & Directions
- Free Admission
The Artists' Wives
Artist:
James Jacques Joseph Tissot
(French, 1836-1902)
Date: 1885
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
57 1/2 × 40 in. (146.1 × 101.6 cm)
Overall, Frame: 69 1/4 × 51 3/4 × 5 in. (175.9 × 131.4 × 12.7 cm)
Classification: European art
Credit Line: Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and The Grandy Fund, Landmark Communications Fund, and "An Affair to Remember" 1982
Object number: 81.153
Terms
- Men
- Women
- Painters
- Wives
- Restaurants
- White
- Green
- Brown
- Black
- Red
- Violet
- Maroon
- Navy blue
- Paris
In Collection(s)
On view
DescriptionThis oil on canvas painting depicts an outdoor scene/restaurant where artists and their wives have gathered, celebrating "le vernissage," or Varnishing Day. This day is on the eve of the official opening of the Salon; participating artists traditionally gathered to view the exhibition privately and put a final coat of protective varnish on the paintings. One of the wives, in a maroon print dress, looks directly at the viewer.
Exhibition History"James Jacques Joseph Tissot, 1836-1902," Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Feb. 28 - May 5, 1968.
"French Salon Paintings from Southern Collections," The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, jan. 21 - March 3, 1983; The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, April 1 - May 22, 1983; The North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, June 25 - Aug. 21, 1983; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Sept. 15 - Oct. 23, 1983. (Exhib. cat. no. 63).
"Exposition J.-J. Tissot: Quinze Tableaux sur la Femme à Paris," Galerie Sedelmeyer, Paris, April 19 - June 15, 1885.
"Pictures of Parisian Life by J.J. Tissot," Arthur Tooth and Sons, London, 1886.
"French Paintings from The Chrysler Museum," North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, May 31 - Sept. 14, 1986; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, Nov. 6, 1986 - Jan. 18, 1987. (Exhib. cat. no. 36).
"Paris and the Countryside: Modern Life in Late - 19th - Century France," Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, June 23 - October 15, 2006.
"Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts," Yale Center for British Art, Yale University, February 12 - May 3, 2009; The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, June 16 - Oct. 4, 2009.
"Upstairs/Downstairs: Masterpieces from the Chrylser Collection," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, October 10 - December 30, 2012.
"James Tissot," Chiostro del Bramante, Rome, Italy, September 26, 2015 - February 21, 2016.
“James Tissot: Fashion and Faith,” Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA, October 12, 2019 – February 9, 2020; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France, March 22, 2020 – September 13, 2020.
"Come Together, Right Now: The Art of Gathering," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, October 11, 2020 - January 3, 2021.
"French Salon Paintings from Southern Collections," The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, jan. 21 - March 3, 1983; The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, April 1 - May 22, 1983; The North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, June 25 - Aug. 21, 1983; The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Sept. 15 - Oct. 23, 1983. (Exhib. cat. no. 63).
"Exposition J.-J. Tissot: Quinze Tableaux sur la Femme à Paris," Galerie Sedelmeyer, Paris, April 19 - June 15, 1885.
"Pictures of Parisian Life by J.J. Tissot," Arthur Tooth and Sons, London, 1886.
"French Paintings from The Chrysler Museum," North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, May 31 - Sept. 14, 1986; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, Nov. 6, 1986 - Jan. 18, 1987. (Exhib. cat. no. 36).
"Paris and the Countryside: Modern Life in Late - 19th - Century France," Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, June 23 - October 15, 2006.
"Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts," Yale Center for British Art, Yale University, February 12 - May 3, 2009; The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, June 16 - Oct. 4, 2009.
"Upstairs/Downstairs: Masterpieces from the Chrylser Collection," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, October 10 - December 30, 2012.
"James Tissot," Chiostro del Bramante, Rome, Italy, September 26, 2015 - February 21, 2016.
“James Tissot: Fashion and Faith,” Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA, October 12, 2019 – February 9, 2020; Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France, March 22, 2020 – September 13, 2020.
"Come Together, Right Now: The Art of Gathering," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, October 11, 2020 - January 3, 2021.
Label textJames Jacques Joseph Tissot
French, 1836–1902
The Artists’ Wives, 1885
Oil on canvas
On the day before the opening of the annual Salon exhibition in France, artists applied a final coat of varnish to their pictures and adjourned to a café to celebrate. James Tissot’s painting depicts this ritual gathering on the terrace of the restaurant Ledoyen, a Parisian institution still today. The bustling scene includes portraits of several well-known artists like the sculptor Auguste Rodin, whose bearded, bespectacled face appears near the center of the painting. More than a portrait of the artists, however, Tissot’s work focuses on the stylish, urban women in attendance—the artists’ wives.
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and The Grandy Fund, Landmark Communications Fund, and “An Affair to Remember” 1982 81.153
French, 1836–1902
The Artists’ Wives, 1885
Oil on canvas
On the day before the opening of the annual Salon exhibition in France, artists applied a final coat of varnish to their pictures and adjourned to a café to celebrate. James Tissot’s painting depicts this ritual gathering on the terrace of the restaurant Ledoyen, a Parisian institution still today. The bustling scene includes portraits of several well-known artists like the sculptor Auguste Rodin, whose bearded, bespectacled face appears near the center of the painting. More than a portrait of the artists, however, Tissot’s work focuses on the stylish, urban women in attendance—the artists’ wives.
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and The Grandy Fund, Landmark Communications Fund, and “An Affair to Remember” 1982 81.153
Published References
Catalogue. _Catalogue of the Works of Art in the Union League of Philadelphia_. 1908: 27.
J. Laver. "Vulgar Society." _The Romantic Career of James Tissot_. London. 1938.
Catalogue. _Catalogue of the Collection of Paintings Belonging to the Union League of Philadelphia_. 1940: 26.
M. Whiteman. _Paintings and Sculptures at the Union League of Philadelphia_. Philadelphia. 1978. 98, 90, ill.
Eric M. Zafran, with an introductory essay by Gerald M. Ackerman. _French Salon Paintings from Southern Collections_. Atlanta, GA: The High Museum of Art. 1982. No. 63.
Essays by Yochanan Muffs and Gert Schiff, and a chronology by Michael Wentworth and David S. Brooke. _Biblical Paintings: J. James Tissot_. New York: Jewish Museum. 1982., 22 ill.
John Russell. _Paris_. New York: Abrams. 1983. 222-223, illustrated.
Michael Wentworth. _James Tissot_. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1984. 162-167, pl. 187, appendix V, no. 10.
Jefferson C. Harrison. "Nineteenth-Century French Art - Part I," _The Chrysler Museum Gallery Guide_. Norfolk, VA: Chrysler Museum. 1985. No. 18.
"Tissot's Novel Art Work," _New York Times_. 05/10/1885: 4.
Christopher Wood. _Tissot: The Life and Work of Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836-1902)_. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 1986: 137, color plate no. 145.
"The Chronicle of Art," _The Magazine of Art_. London. 1886: xxiv.
Jefferson C. Harrison. _French Paintings from the Chrysler Museum_. The Chrysler Museum. 1986. No. 36, 71-72.
John Milner. _The Studios of Paris: The Capital of Art in the Late Nineteenth Century_. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1988: 54, no. 59.
Lois Marie Fink. _American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons_. Washington, DC, and Cambridge: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution and Cambridge University Press. 1990: 104-5, plate 11.
Barbara Stern Shapiro, et al.. _Pleasures of Paris: Daumier to Picasso_. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 1991. Fig. 2, 29.
Jefferson C. Harrison. _The Chrysler Museum Handbook of the European and American Collections: Selected Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings_. The Chrysler Museum. 1991. Plate 115, 146-147.
Mary Ellen Jordan Haight. _Paris Portraits, Renoir to Chanel: Walks on the Right Bank_. Layton, Utah: A Peregrine Smith Book, published by Gibbs Smith, Publisher. 1991: 155, 166.
Ulrich W. Hiesinger. _Julius LeGlanc Stewart, American Painter of the Belle Epoque_. New York: Vance Jordan Fine Art Inc., 1998, 39-41, fig. 21.
Katharine Lochnan, ed. _Seductive Surfaces: The Art of Tissot_. Studies in British Art 6. Yale University Press. 1999. Fig. 38.
Edited by Everett Fahy with a preface by Pierre Rosenberg and contributions by Elizabeth E. Barker, Everett Fahy, George R. Goldner, Alain Gruber, Colta Ives, Asher Ethan Miller, Sabine Rewald, Perrin V. Stein, and Gary Tinterow, _The Wrightsman Pictures_ (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 416, 418. ISBN: 0-300-10719-6
Essays by Gabriel P. Weisberg and Jennifer L. Shaw, with introductory statements by Scott M. Black, Daniel O'Leary and Carrie Haslett,_Paris and the Countryside: Modern Life in Late - 19th - Century France_, exh. cat., Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, 2006, 13-14, 34. ISBN: 091685742-5
Jeff Harrison, _Collecting with Vision: Treasures From the Chrysler Museum of Art_ (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2007), 49, fig. 48. ISBN: 978-0-940744-72-1
Diana Donald and Jane Munro, eds., _Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts_ (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 2009), 278 fig.282.
Eric M. Zafran, "Norfolk's Salon Masterworks Shine Again," _Fine Art Connoisseur_, November-December 2014, 51.
Cyrille Sciama, _James Tissot_ (Milan: Skira, 2015) 130, cat. no. 55.
Melissa E. Buron, _James Tissot_,(New York: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in association with DelMonico Books | Prestel, 2019) fig. 118, page 197.
Provenance
Sale, Christie's, London, March 30, 1889, no. 134; Mr. Day; Charles Field Haseltine; Art Association of the Union League of Philadelphia, 1894; M. Knoedler and Co., New York, 1981; Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and the Grandy Fund, Landmark Communications Fund, and "An Affair to Remember," to the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, 1981.
Catalogue EntryJames Jacques Joseph Tissot
French, 1836-1902
The Artists' Wives, 1885
Oil on canvas, 57½" x 40" (146 x 101.6 cm)
Signed lower left: _J.J. Tissot_
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and The Grandy Fund, Landmark Communications Fund, and "An Affair to Remember" 1982, 81.153
References: Atlanta, 1983, no. 63; Michael Wentworth, _James Tissot_, Oxford, 1984, pp. 162-167; Harrison, _CM_, 1986, no. 36.
A fashionable artist-dandy who enjoyed great wealth and renown in his lifetime, James Tissot devoted much of his mature career to contemporary genre image of modishly dressed Parisians and Londoners. Though he shared his subject matter with many of his Impressionist friends, his precise, anecdotal realism and conservative, polished painting method placed him more firmly in the camp of the academics.
Born in Nantes to a rich cloth merchant, Tissot arrived in Paris around 1856 to begin his art studies. He made his Salon debut three years later. After launching his career with a series of highly finished, medieval costume pictures, by 1865 he turned to society portraiture and scenes of modern urban life that featured an array of beautiful women. These elegant images of chic Second-Empire _parisiennes_ were immensely popular at the Salon, where Tissot exhibited regularly until 1870. To escape the disastrous end to the Franco-Prussian War, Tissot fled Paris for London in 1871 and remained there for the next eleven years. In London he continued to specialize in stylish society paintings, producing portraits of the British upper class and "conversation pieces" of affluent Victorians taking tea by the Thames.
With the death of his beloved Irish mistress Kathleen Newton in 1882, Tissot resettled in Paris. To reawaken his interest in his work there, he displayed at the Galerie Sedelmeyer in 1885 a set of genre paintings entitled _La Femme à Paris (The Parisian Woman)_, his first major production since his return from England. This ambitious series of fifteen large canvases, to which The Chrysler Museum painting originally belonged, celebrated the fabled beauty and style of the women of the French capital - its debutantes and shop girls, its performers and, as seen in the Chrysler painting, the wives of its artists. The series, which was also exhibited in London, at the Tooth Gallery, in 1886, is an extraordinarily rich chronicle of Parisian life during the _Belle Epoque_.
The gathering depicted in _The Artists' Wives_ celebrates _le vernissage_, or Varnishing Day. On this, the eve of the official opening of the Salon, the participating artists traditionally gathered to view the exhibition privately and to put a final, protective coat of varnish on their paintings. In the Chrysler picture the artists, together with their wives and friends, toast the year's effort with a luncheon on the terrace of the restaurant Ledoyen, their smiling faces glowing from the salutary effects of gay company and good wine. Behind them is the entrance to the Palais de l'Industrie (with its famous caryatid portico), which at that time hosted the Salon.
A reviewer writing in the May 10, 1885, edition of _The New York Times_ noted that "nearly all the faces [in _The Artists' Wives_] are celebrities." Among the luminaries who have been identified are the sculptor Rodin (no. 105), the brown-bearded, spectacled gentleman standing in the center of the picture, and the painter John Lewis Brown, the bearded man with top hat who sits with two female companions at the lower left. Beckoned by one of these women, who turns in her chair to greet us, we are invited to take a seat at the empty tables in the foreground and join the happy throng.
Jefferson C. Harrison. _The Chrysler Museum Handbook of the European and American Collections: Selected Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings_. The Chrysler Museum. 1991. Plate 115, 146-147.
French, 1836-1902
The Artists' Wives, 1885
Oil on canvas, 57½" x 40" (146 x 101.6 cm)
Signed lower left: _J.J. Tissot_
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and The Grandy Fund, Landmark Communications Fund, and "An Affair to Remember" 1982, 81.153
References: Atlanta, 1983, no. 63; Michael Wentworth, _James Tissot_, Oxford, 1984, pp. 162-167; Harrison, _CM_, 1986, no. 36.
A fashionable artist-dandy who enjoyed great wealth and renown in his lifetime, James Tissot devoted much of his mature career to contemporary genre image of modishly dressed Parisians and Londoners. Though he shared his subject matter with many of his Impressionist friends, his precise, anecdotal realism and conservative, polished painting method placed him more firmly in the camp of the academics.
Born in Nantes to a rich cloth merchant, Tissot arrived in Paris around 1856 to begin his art studies. He made his Salon debut three years later. After launching his career with a series of highly finished, medieval costume pictures, by 1865 he turned to society portraiture and scenes of modern urban life that featured an array of beautiful women. These elegant images of chic Second-Empire _parisiennes_ were immensely popular at the Salon, where Tissot exhibited regularly until 1870. To escape the disastrous end to the Franco-Prussian War, Tissot fled Paris for London in 1871 and remained there for the next eleven years. In London he continued to specialize in stylish society paintings, producing portraits of the British upper class and "conversation pieces" of affluent Victorians taking tea by the Thames.
With the death of his beloved Irish mistress Kathleen Newton in 1882, Tissot resettled in Paris. To reawaken his interest in his work there, he displayed at the Galerie Sedelmeyer in 1885 a set of genre paintings entitled _La Femme à Paris (The Parisian Woman)_, his first major production since his return from England. This ambitious series of fifteen large canvases, to which The Chrysler Museum painting originally belonged, celebrated the fabled beauty and style of the women of the French capital - its debutantes and shop girls, its performers and, as seen in the Chrysler painting, the wives of its artists. The series, which was also exhibited in London, at the Tooth Gallery, in 1886, is an extraordinarily rich chronicle of Parisian life during the _Belle Epoque_.
The gathering depicted in _The Artists' Wives_ celebrates _le vernissage_, or Varnishing Day. On this, the eve of the official opening of the Salon, the participating artists traditionally gathered to view the exhibition privately and to put a final, protective coat of varnish on their paintings. In the Chrysler picture the artists, together with their wives and friends, toast the year's effort with a luncheon on the terrace of the restaurant Ledoyen, their smiling faces glowing from the salutary effects of gay company and good wine. Behind them is the entrance to the Palais de l'Industrie (with its famous caryatid portico), which at that time hosted the Salon.
A reviewer writing in the May 10, 1885, edition of _The New York Times_ noted that "nearly all the faces [in _The Artists' Wives_] are celebrities." Among the luminaries who have been identified are the sculptor Rodin (no. 105), the brown-bearded, spectacled gentleman standing in the center of the picture, and the painter John Lewis Brown, the bearded man with top hat who sits with two female companions at the lower left. Beckoned by one of these women, who turns in her chair to greet us, we are invited to take a seat at the empty tables in the foreground and join the happy throng.
Jefferson C. Harrison. _The Chrysler Museum Handbook of the European and American Collections: Selected Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings_. The Chrysler Museum. 1991. Plate 115, 146-147.