The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-09-02
M. TIssOT AND HIS WORK.
A Critics Recollection of the French
 Artist

| 1a SllllC0 IcCOllCCllOLI O1 kIlG FI6IlCu Artist
 James Tissot, the pictorial artist, died
 in harness, his "Old Testament Scenes
 and Events" not being terminate ed,
 though three hundred and fifty water color drawings taken from it filled a
 room at the laso salon. Tissot, in 1854,
 left Nantes, his birthplace, at the age
 of eighteen, to study art under Ingres
 and Flandrin. a religious painter who had then a great vogue. He. acquired
 from the former dryness of style that
 became more apparent as he advanced
 in life. In working with Flandrin in
 painting the robes, palms, wings of
 saints, martyrs and angels, he made
 clerical acquaintance valuable to him in
 after life. Ingres had high sense of the beautiful. Tissot hardly ever rose
 in that direction above a sense of pret-
 tiness. One sees how well he succeeded
 in rendering the prettiness of an ingen-
 uous girl in his Meeting of Faust and
 Margherita," in the Luxembourg. lis
 sot went to London in 1867, and re-
 mained there ten years. He supplied French illustrated journals with elabo-
 rately executed drawings of English
 sights and scenes, and filled portfolios with water-color sketches which have
 not yet got into the picture market. On | his return he took house near the Av-
 enue du Bois de Boulogne, which, in the | English way, he covered with creepers.
 He attempted there to revive portrait
 painting in colored wax. as practised by
 the Romans in Egypt in the early cen- turies of the Christian era. He also | took up the arts of enamelling metals, | of carving statuettes in boxwood, of | modelling in terra-cotta, of painting glass for windows, of orfevrerie, and, in
 short, covered too wide a surface to sue | ceed in anything. His exhibition, how
 ever, of his London sketches and of large Parisian scenes in black-and- white proved hit. He brought out
 there a scene he had witnessed in an of ficial salon, the entrance of Madame
 Gauthereau, Ia plus belle femme de Paris" She advances between two files of admirers, who seem to offer her
 an idolatrous worship, not, however, quite devoid of irony.
 Tissot then went, at the suggestion of
 a priest with whom he had become ac- | quainted at Flandrin's, to work in the
 Holy Land. Father Didon intended to 1 go there to gather impressions for a life l of Jesus. If Tissot could become the il- | illustrator of Father Didon's work, he
 and the author would mutually place
 each other on a pedestal Tissot went
 and worked in the realistic spirit l ,4stN ,f 4Io east, he set down Jesus in the exact sites he sketched and amid the people l that he himself saw. As he knew little | history, and had not much imagination, | he could not evoke a Palestine inha bited | by industrious Jews. Greek Colonists, 1 Roman administrators, soldiers and | auxiliaries; a Palestine in which f1ushes of life ran high, and I knew nothing of the Turks; Palestine which boasted of superb cities, Roman and Herodean and in which the luxurious Cleopatra | did not disdain to sojourn. Tissot in- | tended to set right the great artists of l the middle ages and the Renaissance, I He flattered himself on having lighted
 on the real truth so far as the surround | ings of Jesus went He omitted no de- l tail that could be adduced as circum- stantial evidence of the existence of the Saviour as given in the Gospels and | traditional lore. The authenticity of | the sites conflcted in his illustrations in
 water-colors touched up with gouache
 with the legends he had to represent, | It would have been much better to in- dicate vaguely details of Oriental life than to draw them minutely. and thus clog with their prose all the idealism of l the events described in the Gospel and | additionally handed down. In fact, the l elaboration of realistic details belittled instead of exalted the Son of Man. | Their incongruity startled, and could only satisfy puerile minds. The artists | intention was to free himself from all convention, to advance in the way Rus kin pointed out when he attacked the i faisities, as they appeared to him, of
 Raphaels miraculous draught of fishes,
 and to enable Christians to realize through his illustrations the true life of Jesus. His carefully executed drawings once more exemplified the saying: 1 '"The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" The Gospel narrative Tissot
 killed with his paltry details of Pales- ! tine as it is now.-Correspondence of the | London Daily News.