Lot Essay
This is a small contemporary version of a painting which made headlines when it was sold by Christie's in New York in February 1993 for ¨2,071,129, a world record for Tissot and for a Victorian painting. The large picture was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879, the third summer show of the radical new venture that was currently setting the pace of the Aesthetic Movement. The same year Whistler showed his Arrangement in Brown and Black: Portrait of Miss Rosa Corder (Frick Collection, New York) and Burne-Jones his Pygmalion series (Birmingham).
Like all Tissot's work at this period, L'Orpheline is a monument to Kathleen Newton, the beautiful, divorced, Irish girl who became his mistress in 1876. Six years earlier he had settled in London as a refugee from the Franco-Prussian War, and she was to share his house in St John's Wood until her death from consumption in 1882, at the age of twenty-eight, sent him fleeing, inconsolable, back to Paris. Dressed in an elegant, closely fitting black dress and matching hat, she gazes out at us with one of those enigmatic expressions that Tissot loved to give his heroines, standing erect and impassive against the flaming gold of a horse-chestnut in autumn. Beside her is a pretty fair-haired child, modelled by her niece Lilian Hervey and also dressed in black; while in the foreground bullrushes thrust their way up from the sinister dark green water of a pond or lake, causing The Times, in reviewing the Grosvenor exhibition, to ask if the artist was not hinting at 'suicide ... by the muddiest of deaths.' The composition, so perfectly tailored to the smart and brittle theme, is strongly influenced by the Japanese prints which, like so many of his generation with advanced 'aesthetic' ideas, Tissot admired.
Just as Rossetti said that he devised some of his quaintest details 'to puzzle fools', so Tissot was sometimes tempted to bait the philistine and claim that his titles were 'not intended to express anything.' But this was going too far; his titles may be deliberately ambiguous but they are not without meaning. L'Orpheline is no exception, starting a train of thought in the mind of the viewer which the artist proceeds to feed with potent visual images - the mysterious young woman with her clinging companion, the black dresses redolent of mourning, the autumn setting, melancholy for all its blaze of colour, and the murky depths of the water. The question which dominates this symbolist psycho-drama is which figure is the orphan. Tissot keeps us guessing, and may have been unsure himself. Both versions are entitled Orphans in the artist's carnet, or account book, which survives.
The two versions were evidently worked on concurrently, both being recorded in the carnet under 1879, but the conceptions are not identical. The patterns made by the branches, leaves and bullrushes vary, and there are subtle changes in the figures themselves; the woman in our picture is slimmer, more elfin and more chic in appearance than her counterpart in the large version, while her companion is a shade more vulnerable and absent-minded. Tissot sold the small version to the dealer McLean for ¨275, over half the ¨500 he asked for the Grosvenor picture, which is about four times as large.
We are grateful to Professor Willard Misfeldt for his help in preparing this entry.
Like all Tissot's work at this period, L'Orpheline is a monument to Kathleen Newton, the beautiful, divorced, Irish girl who became his mistress in 1876. Six years earlier he had settled in London as a refugee from the Franco-Prussian War, and she was to share his house in St John's Wood until her death from consumption in 1882, at the age of twenty-eight, sent him fleeing, inconsolable, back to Paris. Dressed in an elegant, closely fitting black dress and matching hat, she gazes out at us with one of those enigmatic expressions that Tissot loved to give his heroines, standing erect and impassive against the flaming gold of a horse-chestnut in autumn. Beside her is a pretty fair-haired child, modelled by her niece Lilian Hervey and also dressed in black; while in the foreground bullrushes thrust their way up from the sinister dark green water of a pond or lake, causing The Times, in reviewing the Grosvenor exhibition, to ask if the artist was not hinting at 'suicide ... by the muddiest of deaths.' The composition, so perfectly tailored to the smart and brittle theme, is strongly influenced by the Japanese prints which, like so many of his generation with advanced 'aesthetic' ideas, Tissot admired.
Just as Rossetti said that he devised some of his quaintest details 'to puzzle fools', so Tissot was sometimes tempted to bait the philistine and claim that his titles were 'not intended to express anything.' But this was going too far; his titles may be deliberately ambiguous but they are not without meaning. L'Orpheline is no exception, starting a train of thought in the mind of the viewer which the artist proceeds to feed with potent visual images - the mysterious young woman with her clinging companion, the black dresses redolent of mourning, the autumn setting, melancholy for all its blaze of colour, and the murky depths of the water. The question which dominates this symbolist psycho-drama is which figure is the orphan. Tissot keeps us guessing, and may have been unsure himself. Both versions are entitled Orphans in the artist's carnet, or account book, which survives.
The two versions were evidently worked on concurrently, both being recorded in the carnet under 1879, but the conceptions are not identical. The patterns made by the branches, leaves and bullrushes vary, and there are subtle changes in the figures themselves; the woman in our picture is slimmer, more elfin and more chic in appearance than her counterpart in the large version, while her companion is a shade more vulnerable and absent-minded. Tissot sold the small version to the dealer McLean for ¨275, over half the ¨500 he asked for the Grosvenor picture, which is about four times as large.
We are grateful to Professor Willard Misfeldt for his help in preparing this entry.