Critical opinion of Tissot among writers of his acquaintance was curious. The tone of contemporary biographical sketches and gallery reviews hint at personal dislike, or perhaps, disrespect, of this popular French painter—not only of his work, but also of his person. “He is an inconsequential, garrulous character,” wrote Edmond de Goncourt in his journal, “with a flood of tiring words among which an occasional painterly phrase attracts your attention and puts you back into contact with what he is saying.” That backhanded “occasional“—oh, how it set Melancholy’s teeth on edge. But worse, so much worse, was Henry James:
He is a painter of modern manners, and he generally chooses a subject which it takes a kind of tour de force to render. One of his pictures represents a corner of the deck of one of the Queen’s ships at Portsmouth, with two ladies and a young officer leaning over the side and looking down at a boat containing a party of their friends, which is putting off. They are women of fashion, and dressed in garments, which have come straight from Brussels; the one in front, in particular, who twists her perfect figure with the most charming gracefulness as she rests her elbows on the bulwark, and, with her head a little thrown back, smiles down lazily and luxuriously at her friends. She wears a dress of frilled and fluted white muslin, set off with a great number of lemon-coloured bows, and its air of fitting her well, and, as the ladies say, ‘hanging’ well, is on the painter’s part a triumph of perception and taste.
M. Tissot’s taste is highly remarkable; what I care less for is his sentiment, which seems sterile and disagreeable. Like so many other pictures representing the manners of the day, his productions suggest a curious and, I confiess it seems to me, an insoluble problem. What is it that makes such realism as M. Tissot’s appear vulgar and banal, when an equal degree of realism, practised three hundred years ago, has an inexhaustible charm and entertainment? M. Tissot’s pretty woman, with her stylish back and yellow ribbons, will, I am convinced, become less and less charming and interesting as the years, or even the months, go on. Certain I am, at any rate, that I should not be able to live in the same room with her for a week without finding her intolerably wearisome and unfreshing.
That James, the man who “made love to his Muse” would know anything about living with any woman “in the same (bed)room” was hard enough for Melancholy to endure, but the cruelty of his curt dismissal, so needlessly personal, that nasty “intolerably wearisome and unfreshing”—had James had the misfortune to meet Melancholy in the London streets during the picture season of 1877, the young writer would have found a ready, quick-to-the-draw, defender of Kitty’s honor.
James Tissot and Kathleen Newton must have met no later than 1876, for it is after that date when her face appears, over and over again, in all of his paintings. Before she was identified, scholars called her the “ravissante Irlandaise,” or sometimes, “la Mystérieuse.” Friends of Tissot at the time recalled her effect on his life. They report that Tissot “withdrew from social life as he became increasingly absorbed with the liaison.”
Kathleen Irene Ashburnham Kelly was born in May or June 1854 in Agra, India. She was baptized on August 29, 1860 in Holy Trinity Church, St. Bride’s, London and educated at Gumley House Convent School in Isleworth. She married Dr. Isaac Newton, a surgeon in the Indian Civil Service, on the 3rd of January 1871, in what was then called Hoshearpore in India, but the couple separated one week after the marriage. Her new husband, presumably, had not been happy to find out she was having an affair with Captain Palliser of the Royal Navy. They divorced on January 20th, 1872.
To the etching titled A Walk in the Snow, Tissot appended two lines from “Fancy,” written by Keats in 1818 and published 1820.
She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth hath lost;
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May,
From dewy sward or thorny spray;
All the heaped Autumn’s wealth,
With a still, mysterious stealth:
She will mix these pleasures up
Like three fit wines in a cup,
And thou shalt quaff it:—thou shalt hear
Distant harvest-carols clear;
Rustle of the reaped corn;
Sweet birds antheming the morn:
And, in the same moment—hark!
It is quite possible, writes one scholar, that “Kathleen, whose convent education prepared her to be a sophisticated and cultured helpmate, introduced Tissot to the poetry of Keats.” One of the harshest critics of Kitty Newton, Michael Wentworth, in a book published by the Clarendon Press at Oxford, railed against this divorced adventuress and warned against seeing her as “some sort of bluestocking muse.” He later, confronted with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, in a catalog for an exhibition that toured Japan, reversed his position. For the essential fact about Tissot is this: it is only because of Kathleen Newton, Kitty, that Tissot paints those pictures which make him famous.
