James Tissot

James Tissot was a French painter who found great success depicting fashionable society, especially in Victorian England. Born in Nantes in 1836, he built his early career in Paris before moving to London around 1871. There he painted elegant men and women in beautiful clothes aboard ships, at parties, and in gardens, with a sharp eye for the textures of silk, lace, and modern life.

His glossy, detailed scenes of high society were popular and commercially successful, if sometimes dismissed as shallow by critics. After the death of the woman he loved and a personal crisis, he underwent a religious conversion and spent his later years making detailed illustrations of biblical scenes, traveling to the Middle East for accuracy. Tissot's chic society pictures remain his best loved work.