ABSTRACT
In 1877 John Ruskin referred to the paintings of French artist James Tissot, on display at the first Grosvenor Gallery exhibition in London, as “mere coloured photographs of vulgar society” (“Fors Clavigera” 161).Ruskin’s comments about pictures such as The Gallery of HMS “Calcutta” (Portsmouth) (fig. 12.1), portraying two young women and a naval officer on the deck of a ship at harbor, suggest that the objectionable content-the “vulgar society”–of Tissot’s works was inextricable from their highly detailed, mimetic style, that of the “coloured photograph.” The perceived vulgarity, moreover, was linked by many viewers to the appearance of Tissot’s figures, such as those in HMS “Calcutta,” particularly to their ostentatiously fashionable dress. After a thorough description of the costume of the primary figure in this work, for example, detailing her “dress of frilled and fluted white muslin, set off with a great number of lemon-coloured bows,” Henry James was prompted to ask, “what is it that makes such realism as M. Tissot’s appear vulgar and banal…?” (141). An examination of the contemporary reception of Tissot’s paintings in the 1870s reveals that critics attached the label of vulgar to artwork that threatened traditional definitions and hierarchies of the art world. As evidenced by the persistently negative commentary on Tissot’s apparently “photographic” style, his art evoked mechanical replication and mass-produced arts such as the fashion plate. Moreover, its association with the feminine, as well as the multiplying detail that resonated with a sort of deathly fixedness, further troubled audiences. In the way Tissot’s pictures distanced themselves from the unique, the original, and the singular, all characteristic elements of fine art, they were part of a more general challenge to artistic hierarchies that reveled in a range of vulgar qualities. Yet the artist’s detailed realism, his apparent creation of mere transcripts of the world, obscured the fact that his artwork was every bit as abstract and modernist as James McNeill Whistler’s or Édouard Manet’s work of the same period, though this fact may have been disguised by mimesis. In the critical response to Tissot’s vulgarity, then, we can discern the confusion catalyzed by the dawn of the discourse of flatness, surface, and self-referentiality.
