Fully appreciating the Catholic content in the art of the Frenchman James Tissot (1836 –1902) may be a matter of faith.
His 365 illustrations showing the Life of Christ won gratitude from pious viewers for their didactic, completist virtues. When first exhibited together in Paris, according to <em>The Magazine of Art</em> in 1895, “women were seen to sink down on their knees as though impelled by a superior force, and literally crawl round the rooms in this position, as though in adoration”.
Yet equally intense was the negative response from friends and colleagues, some motivated by envy at Tissot’s commercial success from reproduction and exhibition rights. They had delighted in Tissot’s previous incarnation as a high-society bon vivant, producing paintings of elegant ladies lolling about Paris in diverse graceful poses.
When Tissot visited the Middle East repeatedly to document his new project, some were ready with amateur diagnoses of hyper-religiosity. One such was the caricaturist Leslie Ward, who wrote in a memoir that a paramour of Tissot’s had died (this much was true) and the grief-stricken artist supposedly chose to travel abroad.
“He became at first extremely religious, and then the victim of religious mania. Later, he surprised his world by becoming a monk, driven by his devotion to the memory of the dead woman to the extremities which often arise when a strong character is suddenly disrupted by great sorrow.”
“Finally, Ward concluded, “[Tissot] entered a monastery, where he eventually lost his reason and died.”
Most of the above is tommyrot. Tissot never became a monk and remained entirely sane, as his introduction to his book <em>The Life of Christ</em> indicates. Perhaps the sheer volume of Tissot’s output daunted some contemporaries. Otherwise, they might have noticed the uncanny, proto-cinematic immersion in <em>What Our Lord Jesus Christ Saw from the Cross</em>, created between 1886 and 1894.
In the lower regions of the image, bloodied feet are visible nailed to the Cross, below a sweeping view – which some art historians have likened to a crane shot in cinematography – of the attendees at the Crucifixion. This image uncannily shows us the point of view of the Crucified.
In a further bout of inspiration, Tissot also captured the expressive power of architecture as a setting for Gospel narrative, as may be readily seen from images posted on the website of the Brooklyn Museum, which owns the original artworks. In <em>The Evil Counsel</em> (John 18) , Pharisees seek advice from the high priest Caiaphas, who recommends eliminating Jesus to spare others.
The characters in this scene are huddled into a corner, while the main focus is on the crushing weight of stone steps as an architecture of cruelty. Similarly, <em>In the Villages the Sick Were Brought unto Him</em> shows Christ’s healing powers exhibited under a heavy stone arch, between walls, and on massive steps.
Some visions related by Tissot as motivating his fascination with the Gospels have been discussed by art historians, but others have been relatively overlooked. One, as recounted in <em>McClure’s Magazine</em> in 1899, amounted to visionary stage design. Apparently Tissot, when walking in Paris near the Bois de Boulogne, suddenly saw before him a “massive stone arch out of which a great crowd was surging…And the multitude, with violent gesture, lifted their hands and pointed to a balcony high up on a yellow stone wall where stood Roman soldiers dragging forward a prisoner clad in the red robe of shame.”
Tissot used this imagery to create his watercolour <em>Behold the Man (Ecce Homo)</em>. This blending of holy imagery with architecture reached its apogee in <em>Jesus Looking through a Lattic</em>e, where behind a thick stone wall, amid sunflowers and a grapevine, a scarcely discernible Jesus peers.
To explicate this enigmatic image, Tissot provided a citation from the Song of Songs: “Behold, he standeth behind our wall; he looketh forth at the windows, showing himself through the lattice” (2:9). The slightly immodest allusion is to a previously obscured Saviour, who is being revealed through Tissot’s new artistic project.
His ambitions were brilliantly achieved in a giant image of Christ with the monumental power of a Byzantine icon, painted in 1897 for the Dominican Convent of the Annunciation on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. There Tissot had become acquainted with the French Catholic philosopher Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges OP, who wrote on the moral theory of St Thomas Aquinas and an opus entitled <em>What Jesus Saw from the Cross</em>.
In a preface to his book, Sertillanges advocated that to follow St Paul’s admonition in Romans 13:14 to “put on” Christ, we might place ourselves “not at the foot of the Cross, nor before it, but upon it; with head bowed beneath the inscription, wearing the crown of thorns, pierced by the nails, feeling the cold, rough wood between our shoulders”.
In this way, Sertillanges continued, just as Tissot eventually depicted, we may make “our own the sphere of vision and the emotions that were His, seeing with His eyes and feeling with His heart… still in this same sense of imagining that we have changed places with Him, it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us”.
These insights are worth exploring insofar as some of Tissot’s colleagues, like the waspish Edgar Degas, accused him of seeking wealth with his religious art rather than expressing deeply held belief.
In 1984, the art historian Michael Wentworth, a specialist of Tissot’s worldly secular imagery, suggested that it was impossible to know how much of the artist’s reported visions were “fabricated, the creation of opportunistic self-dramatisation and a thirst for publicity at the time of the exhibition of the illustrations to the Bible”. Wentworth implied that the Tissot Bible might represent “piety and pure faith, commercial exploitation, or a blend of the two, as seems most likely”.
Yet subsequent research by US curator Melissa Buron, among others, identified a notebook in Tissot’s archives in which he had painstakingly compared Gospel texts with the visions of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, an 18th-century Augustinian canoness whose mystical encounters reportedly included apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Jesus Himself, and a number of saints.
In a preface to his <em>Life of Christ</em>, Tissot praised the “precision” of visions by Emmerich, who was beatified by St John Paul II in 2004. Tissot also cited readings from the historian Josephus, the Talmud, the Apocryphal Gospels, early Christian authors and, among more recent writers, Johann Nepomucene Sepp, Edmond Stapfer and Henri Didon.
Tissot singled out for special praise a model of the Temple of Herod reconstructed by Conrad Schick, a German architect, archaeologist and Protestant missionary who settled in Jerusalem in the mid-19th century.
All this ardent study belies the notion of an insincere commercial artist out to make hasty profits. The high points of Tissot’s inspiration provide an even more convincing refutation for anyone willing to look closely at his achievement.
Neither manic nor money-hungry, despite accusations from critics, Tissot was clearly an artist for the ages.<br><br><em>Photo: 'In the Villages the Sick Were Brought unto Him' (detail), by James Tissot; screenshot <a href="https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/13408"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">www.brooklynmuseum.org</mark></a>.</em><br><br><strong><strong>This article appears in the Summer Special July/August 2024 issue of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
