Jacques-Joseph Tissot (b Nantes, 15 Oct 1836; d Ch?teau de Buillon, Doubs, 8 Aug 1902) was a French painter, printmaker and enamellist. He grew up in a port, an experience reflected in his later paintings set on board ship.
He moved to Paris c. 1856 and became a pupil of Louis Lamothe and Hippolyte Flandrin. He made his Salon d?but in 1859 and continued to exhibit there successfully until he went to London in 1871. His early paintings exemplify Romantic obsessions with the Middle Ages, while works such as the Meeting of Faust and Marguerite and Marguerite at the Rampartsshow the influence of the Belgian painter Baron Henri Leys. In the mid-1860s Tissot abandoned these tendencies in favour of contemporary subjects, sometimes with a humorous intent, as in Two Sisters and Beating the Retreat in the Tuileries Gardens. The painting Young Ladies Looking at Japanese Objects testifies to his interest in things Oriental, and Picnic, in which he delved into the period of the Directoire, is perhaps influenced by the Goncourt brothers. Tissot re-created the atmosphere of the 1790s by dressing his characters in historical costume.
