James Tissot - Le Banc De Jardin

Le Banc de jardin
1883
Mezzotiint
41.4×56.2 (China) / 54.4×70.2 cm (sheet)
Signed in the lower left margin “JJ Tissot” and titled in the margin at the bottom in the center "Le Banc de jardin"
The etching was restored by a paper conservator authorized by the museums in France

Jacques-Joseph, known as James, Tissot is a French painter and engraver trained at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, close to Whistler and impressionist artists. From the 1860s, he became the portrait painter of the elegant society of his time, with a particular talent for rendering fabrics, no doubt to be linked to the activity of his parents, respectively cloth merchant and milliner.
In 1871, James Tissot went into exile in London to escape the Commune. There, around 1876, he met Kathleen Newton, an Irishwoman twenty years his junior. This divorced mother of two children, suffering from tuberculosis, becomes his companion and his major source of inspiration. When he died in 1882, the inconsolable artist returned to France for good.
Produced on her return to Paris, Le Banc de jardin is the reproduction by engraving of an eponymous painting dating from 1882. Kathleen Newton is represented surrounded by her son, straddling the back of the bench, her daughter and her niece, in the artist's garden in London. As an experienced engraver, James Tissot chose to use a fairly rare technique for this print, mezzotint engraving, whose vaporous rendering is perfectly suited to the nostalgic evocation of this moment of lost happiness. It was probably in London that the artist discovered this technique prized by the English, which he experimented with four times, adding to a total engraved production of eighty-four etchings and drypoints.

Bibliography:
- James Tissot, Etchings, mezzotint, drypoints, Paris, 1886, p. 26 and 51.
- Michael Justin Wentworth, James Tissot, Catalog Raisonné of his Prints, Minneapolis, 1978, p. 290-293.