James Jacques Joseph Tissot (15 October 1836 – 8 August 1902) was a French painter, who spent much of his career in Britain.
Tissot
was born in Nantes, France. In about 1856, he began study at the École
des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Hippolyte Flandrin and Lamothe, and became
friendly with Edgar Degas and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Tissot
exhibited in the Paris Salon for the first time in 1859, two portraits
of women and three scenes in medieval dress from Faust.
The
latter show the influence of the Belgian painter Henri Leys (Jan August
Hendrik Leys), whom he had met in Antwerp in 1859. In the mid-1860s,
however, Tissot began to concentrate on depicting women, often although
not always shown in modern dress. 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.
The Bunch of Lilacs.
The fireplace