James Tissot

Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836-1902), better known as James Tissot, was a French painter, illustrator, and caricaturist. Tissot was the son of a prosperous shopkeeper, who was a devout Roman Catholic. The young Tissot was sent away to a boarding school run by Jesuits. Tissot Senior seems to have been unenthusiastic about the prospect of his son becoming an artist, but eventually accepted the inevitability of his son's artistic pretensions forming the basis of his career. James Tissot incorporated elements of realism, early impressionism and academic art into his work. He is best known for a variety of genre paintings of contemporary European high society produced during the peak of his career, which focused on the people and women's fashion of the Belle Époque and Victorian England but would also explore many medieval, biblical, and Japoniste subjects throughout his life. His career included work as a caricaturist for Vanity Fair under the pseudonym of Coïdé.