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Lot Essay
Unexhibited in public for 120 years, this picture was presented as a major rediscovery when it was shown as an ex catalogue exhibit, following its recent purchase, in James Tissot, Victorian Life Modern Love, at the Yale Center for British Art, in September 1999. We are grateful to Dr. Malcolm Warner, Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art, for providing us with the following catalogue entry.
The subject of this painting was intensely close to Tissot's heart. The model for the young woman in the hammock was his beloved Irish mistress, Kathleen Newton, with whom he lived at at his villa in the north London suburb of St. John's Wood (fig. 1). Following a brief and disastrous arranged marriage, Newton was divorced when she was only seventeen; by the time of The Hammock she had a daughter by a previous lover and a son in all likelihood by Tissot. No doubt to avoid gossip and scandal, the couple lived a very private life. Newton's face was familiar to London society from Tissot's paintings in which she appeared again and again, but her identity remained a mystery outside of the artist's immediate circle. Only in 1946 was it publicly revealed, when her niece responded to a plea for information from a curious London journalist.
Tissot had moved to London from Paris in 1871. He made his name in the British art world as a painter of intriguing, slightly wry observations of social life, especially party scenes, focusing on the vanities and tribulations of modern love. Toward the end of the 1870s however, he withdrew from the larger stage: the world of his art became the world of his own home and garden, with the impassive, elegant Newton ever present, like the attendant spirit of the place. The Hammock is in many ways the centerpiece of this phase of his career. Tissot and Newton were not to be together for much longer: on November 9, 1882, she died of consumption, aged only twenty-eight. Tissot was devastated; he left the house in St. John's Wood immediately after the funeral and returned for good to Paris.
The setting of The Hammock is Tissot's own garden in St. John's Wood, with its distinctive pool and cast-iron colonnade. The colonnade, which features often in his paintings, was copied from a marble original in the Parc Monceau in Paris. In Victorian London the maintenance of such an elaborate garden was very much a sign of affluence; one of the stories told among Tissot's friends back in Paris was that he was such a success that he had servants in white gloves polishing the leaves of his shrubs. In The Hammock he plays to the idea of luxury, langour, and love. Idly reading her newpaper, tempting the male viewer to erotic thoughts with a glimpse of petticoat, Newton is a modern-day Eve. The sleeping dog near her feet appears as the artist's alter-ego; dogs were associated with both fidelity and sexual desire. With its yellow paper cover, the book on the rug is probably French, and this too may be a symbolic hint at Tissot's own presence, as though he may just have been sitting and reading at his mistress's feet.
Like his friends and fellow artists Manet, Degas and Whistler, Tissot was fascinated by Japanese art and design. He had been a collector of Japanese objects since his early career in Paris in the 1860s, and the parasol in The Hammock is one instance among many in which he uses them in decorative elements in his paintings. By the 1870s Japan had come to represent the liberation from the ways of the West, and the avant-garde artists of the Aesthetic Movement in Britain - notably Whistler - looked to the graceful simplicity of Japanese design as an antidote to the fussy naturalism of most British painting. Newton's hammock is also from a far-away culture: it is Brazilian.
The Hammock celebrates the pleasures of beauty and idleness, spiced with touches of the erotic and the exotic. It was natural that Tissot should have shown such a frankly hedonistic work at the Grosvenor Gallery rather than the older, stuffier, annual exhibition at the Royal Academy. The Grosvenor was Whistler's favourite venue as it was Tissot's, the temple of the Aesthetic Movement and its creed of "art for art's sake". In 1879 Tissot appeared there in strength with no less than three paintings of Newton reading in the hammock: The Hammock itself, A Quiet Afternoon and Under the Chestnut Tree. The last two are untraced but known only in old photographs, and Tissot made an etching of Under the Chestnut Tree entitled, confusingly The Hammock (fig. 2).
Although Tissot made an excellent living in London, the critical reception of his works was by no means always favourable. Often the British reviewers were disturbed by their sensuality and suggestiveness, which seemed merely vulgar: worse still, there seemed something typically French about them. People suspected that, with all his wit and painterly facility, this clever foreigner might be teasing them, subtlely toying with Victorian codes of respectablility - and they may well have been right. Reviewing all three of Tissot's hammock paintings, the critic of the Spectator summed up the prevailing opinion: "these ladies in hammocks, showing a very unnecessary amount of petticoat and stocking, and remarkable for little save luxurious indolence and insolence, are hardly fit subjects for such elaborate painting".
Looking at The Hammock today, 120 years on, we might wonder what more fit subject there could possibly have been. As Michael Wentworth, the leading authority on Tissot's works has remarked, "the warm silence and the dolce far niente that pervade it are nothing less than the purely visual proof of Henry James's assertion that 'summer afternoon' is the most evocative phrase in the English language".
The subject of this painting was intensely close to Tissot's heart. The model for the young woman in the hammock was his beloved Irish mistress, Kathleen Newton, with whom he lived at at his villa in the north London suburb of St. John's Wood (fig. 1). Following a brief and disastrous arranged marriage, Newton was divorced when she was only seventeen; by the time of The Hammock she had a daughter by a previous lover and a son in all likelihood by Tissot. No doubt to avoid gossip and scandal, the couple lived a very private life. Newton's face was familiar to London society from Tissot's paintings in which she appeared again and again, but her identity remained a mystery outside of the artist's immediate circle. Only in 1946 was it publicly revealed, when her niece responded to a plea for information from a curious London journalist.
Tissot had moved to London from Paris in 1871. He made his name in the British art world as a painter of intriguing, slightly wry observations of social life, especially party scenes, focusing on the vanities and tribulations of modern love. Toward the end of the 1870s however, he withdrew from the larger stage: the world of his art became the world of his own home and garden, with the impassive, elegant Newton ever present, like the attendant spirit of the place. The Hammock is in many ways the centerpiece of this phase of his career. Tissot and Newton were not to be together for much longer: on November 9, 1882, she died of consumption, aged only twenty-eight. Tissot was devastated; he left the house in St. John's Wood immediately after the funeral and returned for good to Paris.
The setting of The Hammock is Tissot's own garden in St. John's Wood, with its distinctive pool and cast-iron colonnade. The colonnade, which features often in his paintings, was copied from a marble original in the Parc Monceau in Paris. In Victorian London the maintenance of such an elaborate garden was very much a sign of affluence; one of the stories told among Tissot's friends back in Paris was that he was such a success that he had servants in white gloves polishing the leaves of his shrubs. In The Hammock he plays to the idea of luxury, langour, and love. Idly reading her newpaper, tempting the male viewer to erotic thoughts with a glimpse of petticoat, Newton is a modern-day Eve. The sleeping dog near her feet appears as the artist's alter-ego; dogs were associated with both fidelity and sexual desire. With its yellow paper cover, the book on the rug is probably French, and this too may be a symbolic hint at Tissot's own presence, as though he may just have been sitting and reading at his mistress's feet.
Like his friends and fellow artists Manet, Degas and Whistler, Tissot was fascinated by Japanese art and design. He had been a collector of Japanese objects since his early career in Paris in the 1860s, and the parasol in The Hammock is one instance among many in which he uses them in decorative elements in his paintings. By the 1870s Japan had come to represent the liberation from the ways of the West, and the avant-garde artists of the Aesthetic Movement in Britain - notably Whistler - looked to the graceful simplicity of Japanese design as an antidote to the fussy naturalism of most British painting. Newton's hammock is also from a far-away culture: it is Brazilian.
The Hammock celebrates the pleasures of beauty and idleness, spiced with touches of the erotic and the exotic. It was natural that Tissot should have shown such a frankly hedonistic work at the Grosvenor Gallery rather than the older, stuffier, annual exhibition at the Royal Academy. The Grosvenor was Whistler's favourite venue as it was Tissot's, the temple of the Aesthetic Movement and its creed of "art for art's sake". In 1879 Tissot appeared there in strength with no less than three paintings of Newton reading in the hammock: The Hammock itself, A Quiet Afternoon and Under the Chestnut Tree. The last two are untraced but known only in old photographs, and Tissot made an etching of Under the Chestnut Tree entitled, confusingly The Hammock (fig. 2).
Although Tissot made an excellent living in London, the critical reception of his works was by no means always favourable. Often the British reviewers were disturbed by their sensuality and suggestiveness, which seemed merely vulgar: worse still, there seemed something typically French about them. People suspected that, with all his wit and painterly facility, this clever foreigner might be teasing them, subtlely toying with Victorian codes of respectablility - and they may well have been right. Reviewing all three of Tissot's hammock paintings, the critic of the Spectator summed up the prevailing opinion: "these ladies in hammocks, showing a very unnecessary amount of petticoat and stocking, and remarkable for little save luxurious indolence and insolence, are hardly fit subjects for such elaborate painting".
Looking at The Hammock today, 120 years on, we might wonder what more fit subject there could possibly have been. As Michael Wentworth, the leading authority on Tissot's works has remarked, "the warm silence and the dolce far niente that pervade it are nothing less than the purely visual proof of Henry James's assertion that 'summer afternoon' is the most evocative phrase in the English language".