James Tissot: Fashion & Faith

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris are co-organizing James Tissot: Fashion & Faith, the first major reassessment of the artist’s career in over 20 years. 

In San Francisco, this international retrospective will examine approximately 60 paintings, additional works on paper, and cloisonné enamels by Tissot. Exhibition highlights are drawn from the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, including Tissot’s Self Portrait (ca. 1865) as well as prints and photographs from the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts. 

New scholarship on the artist presented in this collaboration demonstrates that even Tissot’s most ebullient society paintings reveal rich and complex commentary on topics such as nineteenth-century society, religion, fashion, and politics, rendering him an artist worthy of reexamination in the twenty-first century.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Image: James Tissot, "October", 1877. Oil on canvas, 85 x 42.8 in. (216 x 108.7 cm). The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gift of Lord Strathcona and family, 1927.410, Photo MMFA, Brian Merrett