The record prices that works by James Tissot have fetched at auction, as well as the appeal of his subjects to a general public, might well have turned contemporary critical attention away from an artist who, after all, no longer needs to be rediscovered (consider especially the writings of Michael Wentworth). Tissot’s immediate facility would seem to render critical analysis superfluous, analysis certainly less nimble than the artist’s brush. But with a taste for paradox, not the least of the devices available to aesthetic studies, the challenge has been taken up and—it has to be conceded straightaway—with a certain pertinence. The title of the collection of essays emerging from the colloquium organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Seductive Surfaces: The Art of Tissot, suggests that the oeuvre conceals hidden territories and latent complexities. The insinuations of genre painting combined with the enigmas of the artist’s life offer a wide field for this game, at least for anyone who looks at these fashionable canvases with some attentiveness. The ten contributions, almost all of them by female scholars, collected and introduced by Katharine Lochnan, illuminate various aspects, more or less original, of this field.

The internal richness of Tissot’s work and the dense tissue of relationships among the paintings, like so many episodes from a novel with recurring motifs, has always led the majority of critics to neglect any comparisons with contemporaries, at any rate, beyond the aristocrats Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Setting aside Victorian painting, remaining within the Parisian circle, and citing only those who have been the object of recent publications and exhibitions, what are in fact the connections between the art of Tissot and that of Alfred Stevens, Henri Gervex, Giovanni Boldini, or even the likable Jean Béraud? The undeniable originality of the artist could just as well emerge out of a confrontation with the abundant production of these other painters, exploiting in a more trivial manner the same subjects drawn from modern life in its worldly version. Does not the magic of Tissot’s work derive from the ambivalent character of this iconography whose light vacuity renders it suitable for all interpretations?

The ambiguity of the status of women in Tissot’s work is one of the themes running through most of the collected articles, from Nancy Rose Marshall’s very welcome study of the representations of the artist’s companion, Kathleen Newton, to that on the role of fashion by Edward Maeder, to that on the series “The Woman of Paris,” analyzed with brio by Tamar Garb. Nevertheless, and despite the often-striking topics, such as that of the conservatory as a Victorian narrative frame or that of spiritualism, the interpretations often seem to exceed the credible limits of the period (at least for an observer situated outside the Anglo American academic scene). Thus, in a wild quest for signs of fetishism in Tissot, not only the obvious suggestive examples but also the most insignificant candlestick on a mantelpiece are transformed into phallic evidence (207). In another study, consecrated to the hypothetical figure of the blind person in Tissot, the half-hidden bust of an actress—identifiable by the theater mask suspended on her costume by a ribbon and which adorns in a highly symbolic manner, in fact, the upper right corner of The Political Lady—becomes “perhaps a Judith and Holofernes, where the punitive slaying has been augmented by another disfigurement: the severed head has a spear through its eye” (72)! For all that, it is still true, as Carole G. Silver reminds us more judiciously in her study devoted to real or feigned literary allusions in the works, that Tissot often invites us to construct our own narratives based on the represented scenes with a certain degree of uncertainty.

Less ambitious than the vast retrospective of 1984–85 held in England and France, which included among other curiosities the cloisonné enamel objects designed by the artist, the recent exhibition James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love, organized by the Yale Center for British Art, focused principally on the London years, from 1871 to 1882, and on the sentimental thematics, as the subtitle suggested. Although some engravings and gouaches tend to evoke different aspects, this more restricted choice throws Tissot’s work into a necessarily seductive light and, at the same time, allowed Yale to smoothly annex the artist into the British school. In its initial venue, beautiful red cloths hung on the spare walls tended to warm up the architecture and to place back in context an oeuvre whose appeal would be less potent, one has to admit, were it not for the nostalgia that allows us equally to appreciate those cinematographic adaptations of Marcel Proust and Edith Wharton, no doubt impoverished but so refined in the costumes.

In his clear, intelligent, and distanced introduction to the catalogue—in the image of the artist himself, according to the interpretation of him found here—Malcolm Warner avoids the pitfalls of overinterpretation (not always avoided in the entries by his coauthor) and follows the singular evolution of the artist’s vision into that of a detached dandy, and one not without humor. The passage from his first manner, which borrowed from Henri Leys, the poet of historic scenes of old Flanders, to the painter of modern mores indicates less a stylistic rupture than a change of period. Is it not the same solicitude for historical detail, in the end, in both cases? It is evident from that moment on that the acuity of Tissot’s gaze on the ways of his contemporaries was sharpened by his foreignness—first when the painter left Paris for London just after the Commune and then again when he returned to France a decade later and undertook the celebrated series consecrated to the “Woman of Paris.” Likewise, the last part of his oeuvre, entirely devoted to Tissot’s Catholic experience, reflects scrupulous researches in the Holy Land, intended to renew with the same solicitude Biblical iconography.

The catalogue entries by Nancy Rose Marshall present a synthesis of the diverse interpretations opened up by each work. The autobiographical character of many of them nevertheless poses the problem of the perception or nonperception of this aspect by Tissot’s contemporaries. The absence of provenance prevents us here from following the evolution of the taste for the artist. It would have been interesting to know the identity of those amateurs who first acquired the pictures (and how), which were the intimate works kept by Tissot himself, or how the current institutional owners came by the works. The artist’s changes of residence and above all the emphasized contrast between the modernity of his iconographic choices and his traditional painterly technique beyond the virtuosity of his scenography might have led once again to the question of the market for genre painting apart from love thematics in the Victorian epoch. Despite these reservations, and even though the exhibition does not cover Tissot’s entire career, the catalogue imposes itself—by the clarity of its analysis, the elegance of its presentation, and the judicious choice of works—as the most skilled of ambassadors for this artist.