Selected Watercolors from Brooklyn Museum Holdings of James Tissot's Life of Christ |
 |
 |
| Written by Judith F. Dolkart |
| Saturday, 24 October 2009 04:39 |
|
Born in France, James Tissot (1836-1902) had a successful artistic career in Paris before going to London in the 1870s, where he established himself as a renowned painter of London society, spending eleven years there before returning to Paris in 1882. He then began work on a set of fifteen paintings depicting the costumes and manners of fashionable Parisian society women. While visiting the Church of St. Sulpice in the course of his research, he experienced a religious vision, after which he embarked on an ambitious project to illustrate the New Testament.  With the same meticulous attention to detail that he had applied to
painting high society, he now created these precisely rendered watercolors. In
preparation, he made expeditions to the Middle East to record the landscape,
architecture, costumes, and customs of the Holy Land and its people, which he
recorded in photographs, notes, and sketches, convinced that the region had
remained unchanged since Jesus’s time. When he returned to his Paris studio he
drew upon his research materials to execute the watercolors, concentrating on
this project to the exclusion of his previous subject matter. Unlike earlier artists, who often depicted biblical figures anachronistically, Tissot painted the many figures in costumes he believed to be historically authentic. In addition to the archaeological exactitude of many of the watercolors, the series presents other, highly dramatic and often mystical images, such as Jesus Ministered to by Angels and The Grotto of the Agony. Tissot’s detailed chronological approach to recounting the life of Christ, combining Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into one continuous narrative, is known as a “harmony” of the Gospels, a departure from the traditional reading that takes each of the separate books in turn. The exhibition includes a wide range of works from the series, from sweeping historical scenes such as Reconstruction of Jerusalem and the Temple of Herod and Reconstruction of Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre Seen from the Walls of Herod’s Palace to a remarkable tableau of Golgotha as seen from the vantage point of Jesus himself, entitled What Our Lord Saw from the Cross. Many of the images are small, some measuring little more than 6 by 4 inches; the largest are slightly more than 8 by 17 inches. Several of the works, such as The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, The Procession in the Streets of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem, Jerusalem, include large crowds of people, all the more notable because of the detail packed into images of such small scale. Others depict a single, strong figure such as Herod, Jesus shown at various stages of his life, and Mary Magdalene, whose features were modeled after Tissot’s deceased mistress, Mrs. Kathleen Newton. Also on view in the exhibition is a small sketchbook containing pencil and wash drawings done during a trip to Jerusalem. Tissot began the monumental task of illustrating the New Testament in 1886 and first presented selections at the Paris Salon in 1894 (before the series’ completion), where they were received with great enthusiasm. Press accounts on both sides of the Atlantic reported emotional reactions among the visitors: some women wept or kneeled before the works, crawling from picture to picture, while men removed their hats in reverence. Following the completion of the series in 1896, Tissot arranged paid-entry showings in London and in the United States; a successful multi-city tour visited Manhattan, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
Because the Museum’s landmark building on Eastern Parkway was still in the process of being constructed, with only the West Wing open, the Tissot watercolors were first shown in a Montague Street gallery; the walls were adorned with flowers and palms, and a boy soprano sang devotional music. For a sixteen-day period, the Institute extended its exhibition hours from 9 a.m. until 10 p.m. In May 1901 the 350 watercolors, newly mounted in gold mats and reframed, went on view for the first time on Eastern Parkway; records seem to indicate they remained on nearly continuous display until the 1930s. Since then, in part because of conservation concerns, they have only rarely been shown, and then only small portions of the series, most recently in late 1989 through early 1990. The Brooklyn Museum, housed in a 560,000-square-foot, Beaux-Arts building, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the country. Its world-renowned permanent collections range from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to contemporary art, and represent a wide range of cultures. Only a 30-minute subway ride from midtown Manhattan, with its own newly renovated subway station, the Museum is part of a complex of nineteenth-century parks and gardens that also includes Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Prospect Park Zoo. Visit : http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/ Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
Related Articles :
