These Stunning 19th-Century Artworks Reveal the Contradictions of the Modern Woman

Rendered in dramatic shades of black, an 1883 print by the artist James Tissot depicts a young woman staring out at the viewer with wide eyes. Her outfit is dazzling: sleeves fringed with fur, a large hat piled high with ribbons, an oversized arrangement of bows bursting forth from her collar. The work’s title, Sunday Morning, and the Bible that the woman clutches in a gloved hand suggest she is heading to church. But her gaze is pensive, her brow slightly raised. She looks worried.

Like many of Tissot’s artworks, the scene is ambiguous but invites a winking interpretation. Why is this beautiful woman so ill at ease on her way to church? Has she sinned? If so, with whom?

Tissot’s flair for tantalizing subtexts and eye for the sumptuous details of women’s clothing made him a favorite of wealthy clients in France, where he was born, and England, where he lived at the height of his career. Many of his subjects were fashionable, bourgeois women, whom he depicted in an array of settings that reflected the many facets of modern life in the late 19th century. In brightly colored paintings and intricate prints, Tissot’s subjects appear at home and on city streets, in gardens and at parties, surrounded by children and in the company of lovers.

A small but compelling selection of the artist’s compositions—among them Sunday Morning—is now arrayed across coral-colored walls at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto. A new exhibition at the gallery, “Tissot, Women and Time,” explores the diverse and often contradictory representations of modern women in Tissot’s work, with a particular focus on his subjects’ experiences of time.

By the second half of the 19th century, the pace of life in Europe had accelerated to an unprecedented degree. Fueled by the Industrial Revolution, the speed and scope of travel increased, cities swelled with rural immigrants, and a renewed push for colonial expansion was underway. These seismic changes generated new concepts of time, says exhibition co-curator Mary Hunter, an art historian at McGill University in Montreal. The loose timekeeping of the pre-industrial era, which was based on natural cycles of the day and could vary from community to community, gave way to standardized measures of time to meet the needs of an industrialized society.

“Greenwich Mean Time was established in 1884, in no small part because of train travel,” says Hunter, a specialist in 19th-century French art who researches theories of time, among other subjects. “It was incredibly hard to organize when to get to the train when every town had a different clock.”

But time is never a purely objective entity. It is experienced by individuals. It can rush or crawl. The new exhibition argues that Tissot’s compositions show women existing in both fast and slow time, reflecting his era’s conflicting ideals of femininity. The women in his artworks are cast as symbols of modernity: They are strikingly fashionable, subtly seductive and, at times, active participants in a rapidly evolving society. But they also hover at the fringes of modern life, whiling away the hours in the domestic sphere as the industrialized world spins around them.

A London love affair

Tissot was born in 1836 in Nantes, a port city in western France. His exposure to the world of fashion began during his early years; his father worked as a linen draper, while his mother was a milliner. In 1857, Tissot moved to Paris, where he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts and rubbed shoulders with a circle of avant-garde artists, among them Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. Years later, Tissot would decline Degas’ invitation to join the Impressionists at their first exhibition in 1874—he didn’t need the exposure or money—but he shared the group’s radical commitment to capturing modern life.

Tissot was particularly fascinated by the mores and materialism of high society. His paintings won the admiration of affluent patrons in Paris, but despite his success there, Tissot had his sights set on England. He was a longtime Anglophile, even changing his name from Jacques-Joseph to James. The devastating Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 ultimately spurred his move across the English Channel. Tissot served as a sharpshooter in the French National Guard and may have supported the short-lived Paris Commune, a radical insurrection that sprang up after France’s defeat. He fled to London after the Commune was suppressed.

Tissot quickly established himself as an astute chronicler of Victorian life, with compositions that ranged in subject from glittering society parties to women of questionable repute sailing on the River Thames. Some British critics found his artworks too risqué, too “vulgar”—too French. But among the city’s fashionable set, Tissot’s arresting, often-humorous paintings were highly popular. He also embraced etching, a printmaking technique that allowed him to disseminate his art at a more affordable price. With his substantial earnings, Tissot purchased a house in the affluent district of St. John’s Wood. The unconventional woman who captured his heart happened to live nearby.

Kathleen Newton was an Irishwoman 18 years Tissot’s junior and, controversially, a divorced mother. After the dissolution of her arranged marriage to a doctor in the Indian Civil Service, she moved to England and gave birth to a daughter in 1871. Five years later, she had a son—possibly Tissot’s. Newton’s divorce meant that the lovers could not marry, since both were Catholic. But that didn’t deter them from living together openly in Tissot’s home. Newton also became the artist’s primary model. While most of the portraits on view at the AGO don’t depict specific women, Newton’s face appears again and again.

Tissot’s years with Newton were joyful but not always easy. The couple’s domestic arrangements were scandalous to the Victorian elites whom Tissot sought to paint, and they may have caused the artist internal angst, too. “His art was bought by British society, but he couldn’t go [into society] with his girlfriend,” says Hunter. “Even though France was becoming more and more secular, he was very Catholic. You see a lot of complications and tensions [in his work]. He’s a more interesting figure because he’s hard to read.”

Fast time …

Interspersed throughout the exhibition are vibrant artworks that situate women amid the electrifying rush of modern life. In Emigrants (1880), for example, a woman stands at the edge of a ship, holding a baby wrapped in a tartan blanket. They are surrounded by a chaotic lattice of masts and rigs, hallmarks of the nautical flow that brought people and goods to ports along the Thames. The print also highlights Tissot’s interest in women of diverse classes; his subject, though not impoverished, does not appear to belong to elite society. As art historian Nancy Rose Marshall writes in James Tissot: Victorian Life, Modern Love, the work represents “the universality of the drive to leave one’s home in search of a better life.”

Wealthy women also appear in Tissot’s cityscapes, engaged in pursuits that would have signaled their elevated status to Victorian audiences. The Portico of the National Gallery, London (1878) shows a stylish woman standing on the steps of the famed museum while clutching an artist’s portfolio. Copying artworks was a respectable pastime for middle- and upper-class Victorian women, though once again, Tissot leaves the narrative open to a suggestive analysis. Hunter notes that a shadow behind the woman appears to be cast by someone standing in front of her. Who has accompanied her on this outing? A friend? A lover?

The very presence of women in Tissot’s representations of the city is significant. “The modern woman, at that point, was a woman who did claim public space in some form,” says Lydia Murdoch, a historian at Vassar College and the author of Daily Life of Victorian Women.

Murdoch explains that a “battle over women’s access to public space” took place in the later decades of the 19th century, stemming from fervent opposition to a series of laws known as the Contagious Diseases Acts. In an effort to curb the spread of sexually transmitted infections among Britain’s military, the acts allowed police in port and garrison towns to detain any woman suspected of sex work and force her to submit to an invasive medical exam. If signs of infection were observed, she was confined to a hospital. Critics argued that the acts deprived women—including those who were not sex workers—of their basic rights.

“Any woman could be suspected of being a prostitute … simply by being on the streets in public,” says Murdoch. “This became a campaign that really united middle-class [and] elite women.”

Activists in the 19th century also rallied for improvements to women’s education, a cause that is arguably reflected in Tissot’s The Newspaper (1883). The print features a woman peering at a paper from beneath a large, fluffy hat. She is dramatically chic, but Tissot also emphasizes her knowledge. Leaves of the Japanese horse-chestnut tree fan out behind her, signaling an engagement with contemporary art trends; Japanese art was all the rage among Impressionists in France, and Tissot collected it avidly. The woman’s choice of reading material points to a progressive interest in global affairs. Fashion magazines and novels were the traditional purview of elegant ladies; it was “still considered a little bit radical” for women to read the newspaper, according to Hunter.

… and slow time

The bustle and irreverence of such scenes stand in challenging contrast to Tissot’s many compositions that show women passing the hours in plodding domesticity. They read books and embroider. They go to church. Often, they simply lounge at home, languid and ornamental in their beautiful clothes. These works are saturated with symbols of a more traditional ideal of elite femininity. “Slow time, especially of those domestic spaces, was associated with middle-class and upper-class women’s time,” Hunter says.

In The Hammock (1880), a woman relaxes outside under the shade of a leafy tree. True to his fondness for saucy details, Tissot shows just a bit more of her ankles than British critics found decent. But this is, ultimately, a Victorian domestic scene. Children play in the background. The woman boasts a large wedding ring on her finger. She is reading a novel, in the still seclusion of a garden.

Multiple works in the exhibition feature women sleeping or recovering from illness, an artistic convention that was “incredibly fashionable in the 19th century in the United Kingdom and Europe,” says Hunter. “It’s a bit of a male fantasy of the unconscious, freer, sleeping woman.” The woman in repose offered Victorian viewers an unthreatening sort of sexiness, contained to armchairs and sick beds.

The Convalescent (1872) shows a young woman resting on a chair in a domestic greenhouse. Her hair falls loosely down her back, and she wears a housecoat, infusing the painting with a seductive intimacy. Her embroidered housecoat, the patterned yellow pillow on which she rests and the tropical plants in her greenhouse were fashionable items introduced to Europe through colonial expansion in the Southern Hemisphere. The sitter is connected to that fast-paced world of global travel and trade but also removed from it. Her time is spent in placid idleness as she waits for her health to return.

To some extent, Tissot’s portrayals of wealthy women lounging at home reflect the realities of a stratified English society; ladies of the leisure classes had more time to spare, certainly, than their working-class counterparts. But Hunter cautions that “art is always a representation of something, and it’s always a figure of the artist’s imagination.” In works like The Convalescent, she sees a sense of unease over a modernizing society that was sweeping women up in its fray.

“As women were becoming more educated [and] getting the right to divorce, that radically changed things,” Hunter says. “These are somewhat safe images of a femininity that’s kept more domestic.”

The women of Paris

Tissot’s years as a Victorian painter came to a tragic end when Newton died of tuberculosis in 1882. Devastated by the loss, Tissot moved back to Paris, where he sought to re-establish himself after a decade-long absence with an ambitious series that he titled La Femme à Paris, or The Women of Paris. In 15 large-scale paintings, Tissot sought to convey the uniqueness of the modern Parisian woman, who was seen as embodying the excitement and beauty of the city.

The AGO’s exhibition includes Tissot’s print reproductions of the paintings and one original, The Shop Girl (1883-1885). Interspersed with these busy images of women in the modern city are vibrant portrayals of the working class—which, when juxtaposed with Tissot’s languorous depictions of elegant ladies, emphasize the “different ways in which women were filling their days,” Hunter says.

The Shop Girl, for example, portrays an attendant in a store selling ribbons and fabric, who smiles as she holds the door open for a customer. A wide, Parisian boulevard filled with shops and people is visible through the window. With the rise of department stores in the 19th century, the shop girl became “a key figure of modern life,” Hunter says. Dressed demurely in black, Tissot’s subject is portrayed as a respectable, working-class woman—but the salacious undertones that appear in many of his artworks are present, too. A man in a top hat leers into the store through the window. The counter is decorated with a snarling griffin, its open mouth and lolling tongue pointed at the shop girl.

“Each scene [of The Women of Paris] is at some level erotic,” writes art historian Malcolm Warner in James Tissot: Victorian Life, Modern Love. “The idea of the Parisienne implied sexual adventure in a world of modernity and style.”

Ironically, French critics found the series awkward and outdated. Fashion in the capital had moved on during the years Tissot was away. One critic disdainfully complained that the artist’s subjects were “always the same Englishwoman.” By this point, at any rate, Tissot’s pursuit of modern-life themes had started to give way to new interests. He spent the rest of his life painting fervently religious compositions and busying himself with the pursuit of Spiritualism, believing that Newton was communicating with him from beyond the grave.

Today, Tissot—who died in 1902 at age 65—is a somewhat marginal figure, in part because he is difficult to define. He was shaped by both French Impressionism and Victorian art but was often considered too English for one and too French for the other. “You’re not going to find him in an ‘introduction to Impressionism’-type book,” Hunter says. “But I think he’s part of the conversation.”

Hunter hopes the AGO’s exhibition will foster a renewed appreciation for Tissot’s talents, and for the “fascinating” historical insights that can be gleaned from his art. Tissot’s 19th-century admirers certainly recognized his sparkling ability to capture their unique moment in time. As one critic wrote, “[If] our industrial and artistic creations may perish, our customs and costumes may fall into oblivion, a painting by Mr. Tissot will be enough for archaeologists of the future to reconstruct our era.”

“Tissot, Women and Time” is on view at the at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto through June 29, 2025.