Although he is frequently classified as a Victorian artist, no individual better depicted the splendor and elegance of the Belle Epoque than James Tissot. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1860’s where he became friends with Whistler, Degas and the Impressionists. His early success at the Salon brought him in contact with fashionable society who commissioned him to paint their portraits and chronicle their social occasions.

In 1871, after being involved in the Franco-Prussian War, Tissot moved to London where he worked with Seymour Hayden (Whistler’s brother-in-law) and mastered drypoint. His drypoint etchings are masterworks of light and shadow used to build contrasting textures and patterns that show a quality of melancholy and tension between the figures giving his works a much greater psychological impact. The influence of realism can be seen in his style and his subjects as they were depicted with meticulous detail and precisely graded tones. He was also clearly influenced by the Belle Epoque style as his works are both romantic and of sheer decorative beauty.

Many of Tissot’s paintings and prints dealt with scenes from his private life and great romance with Kathleen Newton, a beautiful, young divorcée with two illegitimate children. Her premature death in her late twenties deeply sorrowed Tissot. He moved back to Paris, plunged himself into his work and subsequently traveled extensively painting religious scenes. He spent his last two years at the abbey in Buillon and died in relative obscurity.

Tissot fought in the Franco-Prussian War and then in defense of the Paris Commune. Either because of the political associations caused by the latter, or simply because of better opportunities, he left Paris for London in 1871. Having already worked as a caricaturist for Thomas Gibson Bowles, the owner of the magazine Vanity Fair, as well as exhibited at the Royal Academy, Tissot arrived with established social and artistic connections in London. He quickly developed his reputation as a painter of elegantly dressed women shown in scenes of fashionable life. In 1874, Degas asked him to join them in the first exhibition organized by the artists we call the Impressionists, but Tissot refused. He continued to be close to the artists however. Berthe Morisot visited him in London in 1874 and he traveled to Venice with Edouard Manet at about the same time. He also saw Whistler regularly.

During the mid-1880s, Tissot experienced a religious revelation which led him to spend the rest of his life illustrating the Bible. He traveled to the Middle East in 1886, 1889, and 1896 to make studies of the landscape and people. His series of 365 gouache illustrations showing the life of Christ were shown to critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences in Paris (1894-5), London (1896) and New York (1898-9), before being bought by the Brooklyn Museum in 1900.  They were published in a French edition in 1896–7 and in an English one in 1897-8. Tissot spent the last years of his life working on paintings of subjects from the Old Testament (Jewish Museum, New York).  Although he never completed the series, he exhibited 80 of them in Paris in 1901 and engravings after them were published in 1904. Tissot died in Doubs, France in 1902, while living in the Château de Buillon, which he had inherited from his father in 1888.