Tissot

Tissot: The Life and Work of Jacques Joseph Tissot 1836-1902 by Christopher Wood, 155 pages

Tissot was a very financially successful painter in his own lifetime - first as a portraitist and painter of society life in London, later as a religious painter in Paris - and yet even then he was always something of an outsider - in exile he was a bit too French for the English and upon his return a little too Anglicized for the French.  Critically, too, he is slighted as a minor painter who borrowed everything interesting about his work, or remembered fondly but passingly for his depictions of Victorian elegance. 

Wood does little to dispel any of these views - in fact, he reinforces them.  He moves rapidly through his subject's life and work, pausing only briefly to consider a particular piece or moment in time.  Certainly, he never tries the patience of his readers, and he is quite candid about what he sees as Tissot's artistic shortcomings.  Less attractively, he is also rather determined about how we, as more-modern-than-moderns, ought to see Tissot's life and work.  It is no doubt for all these reasons that the chapter considering Tissot's famous illustrations of the Bible is quite abbreviated, and none of the relevant works are reproduced in color, a rather glaring contrast to the rest of the book.