Shedding new light on James Tissot’s An interesting story

James Tissot’s enigmatic and visually lavish An interesting story, c. 1872, has been entertaining and delighting NGV patrons since it was acquired in 1938 with funds from the Felton Bequest. It was first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1872, the year after Tissot emigrated from France to London in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war and is set against the buzzing maritime activity on the Thames.

Tissot’s parents were hat and clothing merchants, and he has used this understanding of the texture, drape and craftsmanship of luxury fabrics to render the outfits with breathtaking realism. Astonishingly, the fashions are not from Tissot’s time, but meticulous historical reconstructions of eighteenth-century items. The same models, wearing almost identical clothing, appear in a group of closely related Tissot paintings, including Bad news (The parting).¹James Tissot’s Bad news (The parting), 1872, is in the collection of Amgueddfa Cymru, Wales, https://museum.wales/art/online/?action=show_item&item=1817

Ostensibly, the subject matter of An interesting story is a boastful soldier ‘mansplaining’ a story to two disinterested young women, but Tissot’s narratives are often more ambiguous and open to interpretation than they initially appear. For instance, does the action take place in a public dining room, steamboat passenger lounge or domestic space? What events proceeded the action taking place? What is the relationship between the three figures?

Contemporary reviews of the painting offered subtly different interpretations of its narrative. The Pall Mall Gazette described it as a ‘picture of an eighteenth-century captain’ who ‘stands up to pound the tale of his campaigns into the unwilling ears of a couple of yawning girls’.²‘Pictures at the Royal Academy’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 18 Jul. 1872, p. 11. The Illustrated London News identified him not as a currently serving captain, but an ‘old’ Chelsea pensioner; that is, a soldier who has retired due to age or disablement.³‘The Royal Academy Exhibition’, The Illustrated London News, 25 May 1872, p. 502.
From 1692 until 1955 the Royal Hospital Chelsea administered and paid all pensions for soldiers of the British army who had become disabled or completed their term of service. For further information on the Chelsea pensioners refer to https://www.chelsea-pensioners.co.uk/what-chelsea-pensioner

While contemporary reviewers assumed that the mysterious map on the table was the record of a military battle, at one point in the painting’s history its title was changed to Tracing the North-West Passage, suggesting an alternative reading of the map as the legendary sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which was successfully navigated by Roald Amundsen in 1906 after centuries of failed exploration attempts.

An interesting story has recently been examined, cleaned and restored for the first time in many decades, providing fascinating insights into Tissot’s choice of materials and how every technical decision contributes to the communication of mood and meaning in this complex, multilayered composition.

Tissot’s materials and methods

Tissot’s career coincided with a period of momentous change in art practice during the mid to late nineteenth century, defined by the introduction of vibrant new colours, innovations in brush-making and improvements in the availability and portability of art materials. The new medium of photography was also a great inspiration, as evidenced by the intentionally haphazard, snapshot-like cropping of An interesting story.

Tissot was a contemporary of the French Impressionists and a friend of Edgar Degas, but his working methods were highly idiosyncratic, synthesising a variety of avant-garde and Old Master influences. Recently, his unique technical contribution has been studied in conjunction with the exhibition James Tissot: Fashion & Faith, 2019–20, at the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, providing a critical reference point for the restoration.⁴Sarah Kleiner, ‘Tissot’s painting techniques’, in Melissa Buron (ed.), James Tissot: Fashion & Faith, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in association with DelMonico Books, New York, 2019. An interesting story was found to contain many of the recognised hallmarks of Tissot’s technique, along with a few intriguing surprises.

By the 1870s, a wide range of painting materials were available for artists to purchase off the shelf, including canvas and panels. For An interesting story, Tissot has chosen a thick mahogany panel crafted and pre-primed by the artists’ colourman George Rowney and Co. The panel bears a paper Rowney label in the centre of the reverse, with an underlying impressed stamp that can be seen in the X-radiograph. Such beautiful supports were among the most costly, with an 1849 Rowney catalogue listing mahogany panels at quadruple the price of an equivalent stretched and prepared canvas.⁵J.S. Templeton, ‘List of materials for oil painting’, A Guide to Oil Painting, 9th edn, George Rowney and Co., London, 1849.

At 23.3 x 30.1 inches, the panel is approximately 1.7 inches (4.3 cm) shorter in height than the 25 x 30-inch standard size mahogany panels sold by Rowney and fellow colourmen Winsor & Newton in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although Tissot did cut down pre-prepared panels on occasion, the presence of a manufacturer’s bevel on all four sides of the reverse indicates that he intentionally ordered it custom made in this size.⁶Kleiner, p. 240. The more elongated format encourages the eye to move across the composition in a horizontal direction.

As observed in other paintings, Tissot has supplemented the manufacturer’s white priming with a briskly applied semi-transparent reddish-brown toning layer, which functions as a mid-tone and imparts a warm undertone to the colours.⁷ibid. This was at odds with the prevailing trend toward light coloured grounds and more akin to the techniques of Spanish and Italian masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tissot appears to have used black-brown paint to outline the composition over the toning layer, which is consistent with his usual practice.⁸ibid. p.241.

While his Impressionist contemporaries were experimenting with highly textured, tactile brushwork, Tissot has kept the paint relatively smooth to emphasise the illusion of reality rather than the materiality of the work. Despite this, his brushwork is varied and lively, incorporating a variety of brush gestures to evoke different textures, including dabs, stipples, and dashes. The palette comprises an intriguing mix of historic and modern pigments, identifiable using a non-destructive technique called X-ray fluorescence, which provides a fingerprint of the elements present.

For the white areas, Tissot has used lead white, a traditional white with a slightly yellowish tinge, in combination with a then recently introduced white known as zinc white, which provided a brighter hue ideal for final touches such as the flickering highlights on the water. An intense green stroke on the central boat contains copper and arsenic, indicating emerald green, while cobalt blue was detected in the cuffs of the soldier’s coat. These nineteenth-century pigments were prized by the Impressionists for their pure, intense colour, but Tissot has employed them in a relatively judicious way, as a means of emphasising specific forms while maintaining an overall subdued chromatic harmony.

For the soldier’s coat Tissot has selected the traditional mercury-based red pigment, vermilion. Pure vermilion can be bright and flamboyant, particularly when mixed with red lake pigments, but here it appears somewhat muted, likely due to the addition of earth colours and black. This gives the coat a slightly worn and faded appearance which contrasts with the crisp, luminous black and white dresses worn by the two women. This may be another clue that the soldier is in fact considered ‘old’, or perhaps a victim of some misfortune.

Yellow has been used sparingly, primarily to accent the extravagant ribbons on the hat at the right side. Here it has been mixed with white to create bright, clear tints. By the mid nineteenth century a variety of new yellow pigments based on compounds of chrome and cadmium had become available. These quickly superseded the historic pigment Naples yellow, which is a compound of lead and antimony that has been synthesised since ancient times. Surprisingly the yellow areas contain no compelling evidence of chrome or cadmium

As lead occurs throughout due to the white, the main marker for Naples yellow is antimony. This is more easily detectable in pure, undiluted yellow paint compared to paints mixed with white. Nevertheless, there is evidence of a weak signal for antimony suggesting the probable use of genuine Naples yellow. Tissot’s rejection of the latest high-key yellows in favour of a more muted historic yellow, known for its slightly greenish tinge, perhaps makes sense when considered in the context of the eighteenth-century setting. That is, it provided a softer and more harmonious effect which visually referenced the Old Masters.

The restoration

An interesting story is in excellent condition for a painting of its age, partly owing to Tissot’s insistence on the highest quality materials. The mahogany panel remains flat and stable, apart from some isolated cracks observed at the centre of each side. One of these cracks has been repaired with a plywood patch, possibly by Harley Griffiths, who worked as consultant conservator at the NGV from the early 1950s. While written documentation of treatments was not yet standard practice at this time, the repair itself has been dated in pencil, 6 June 1958.

The painting was proposed for restoration due to the yellowed and deteriorated varnish layer, which was causing the image to appear dull and flat. This comprised two distinct layers which could be sampled and analysed using Fourier Transform Infrared Reflectography (FTIR) for comparison to known reference samples. While the lower layer was consistent with a traditional natural resin varnish, the uppermost varnish was a match for AW2, one of the first synthetic resins to be used as picture varnishes. As AW2 was produced by BASF from the 1930s to the 1960s, this varnish may well have been applied at the NGV, potentially at the same time as the plywood patch.

The capacity to identify varnish layers using scientific instrumentation is very advantageous as it means that organic solvent mixtures can be tailored to each type of coating, so that they can be removed one layer at a time without any risk to the original paint. During the cleaning, some old, discoloured passages of restoration were revealed, which in some cases extend over areas of intact original paint. Where safe to do so, these were removed or reduced using solvent and emulsion-based cleaning systems known as gels.

The painting was revarnished with a new synthetic varnish called MS3, which is similar to early synthetic varnishes such as AW2 but has been chemically refined to maximise its ageing properties and reversibility. The varnish has provided critical saturation for Tissot’s rich deep blacks, increasing the light-dark contrasts, which in turn enhances the sense of depth and spatial recession in the painting. The final stage involved discrete retouching with MS3 mixed with dry pigments to reintegrate damages, abrasions, and residues of old restoration.

It has been exciting to observe nuances in the lighting that were not obvious before the restoration; for instance, the naturalistic sense of bright enveloping daylight, and the way that Tissot has rendered the sky differently according to whether it is seen through open windows, single panes, or double panes. While easily lost with age, these subtleties are integral to the depiction of light and space in the painting. They are a reminder of Tissot’s extraordinary powers of observation, technical skill, and the sense of discovery he intended viewers to feel as their eye falls on one intriguing detail after another.

Raye Collins is Conservator of Paintings at NGV.

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