Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 58-11, Section: A, page: 4104.

Directors: Jules D. Prown; Esther Da Costa Meyer.

This dissertation treats the pictures of London produced by French artist James Tissot (1836-1902) during his eleven-year sojourn in England in the 1870s. Grouping the paintings according to categories of urban space--including the ball-room, the Thames-side, sites characterized by monumental public architecture, and the garden--I examine them both in light of Tissot's own artistic and professional strategies and in terms of the larger social and cultural meanings they would have had for their first audiences.

As a Frenchman, Tissot maintained an outsider's perspective on his adopted city, which became a marketable aspect of his painterly vision. Familiar as he was with the Parisian avant-garde artistic milieu, Tissot also used his London pictures to experiment with modern-life subject matter and various ways of disrupting his English audience's narrative expectations. I interrogate the way his work, in its similarities to elements of mass culture such as the photograph, the periodical illustration, or the fashion plate, flirts with commerciality, suggesting that this aspect of his art constitutes his particular form of modernity.

Secondly, I examine the reception of the pictures themselves in British art institutions. By investigating the facture of the paintings, analyzing the various elements of composition, color, and form, I demonstrate the process by which they performed their work of representation. Situating these observations in what I can discover about how the depicted objects, people, and buildings were constructed in public discourses at the time, as well as how the pictures themselves were articulated by art critics, I recuperate Victorian interpretations, although by no means offering seamless or unified readings.