James Tissot

James Tissot (1836-1902) fled Paris after the Commune in 1871 and made a second career in London painting the society he found there: deck parties, ballrooms, women in striped silk on the decks of ships, all of it observed with a slightly cold eye for costume and status. In 1885 a religious experience in a Paris church ended that life. He spent the rest of it on the Bible, travelling repeatedly to the Middle East to get the landscape, the dress and the faces right, and producing some 350 watercolours of the life of Christ followed by a series on the Old Testament. The results were exhibited to enormous crowds on both sides of the Atlantic. This archive holds high-resolution scans of his work, free to preview and available as originals for printing.