?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
JAMES JACQUES TISSOT La plus jolie Femme de Paris.
Etching and drypoint, 1885. 400x255 mm; 15 3/4x10 inches, full margins. A superb, richly-inked impression of this very scarce etching.
Though Wentworth notes that Tissot (1836-1902) announced this etching to be issued in an edition of 500, it seems that much fewer than the entire edition were actually printed.
We have found only 7 other impressions at auction in the past 30 years.
This etching is based on Tissot's same titled oil painting from 1883-85 now in the collection of the Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva. According to Paquette, "Immediately after Tissot's mistress and muse Kathleen Newton died of tuberculosis in November, 1882, he abandoned his St. John's Wood [London] home and moved back to Paris, which he had left following the bloody aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. During his eleven years in London, he had declined Edgar Degas' invitation to show his work with the artists who became known as the Impressionists.
Tissot exerted himself to re-establish his reputation in Paris with a series of fifteen large-scale pictures called La Femme à Paris (The Parisian Woman). Painted between 1883 and 1885, they portrayed the fashionable parisienne in various incarnations using brighter, modern colors than he had in his previous work.
The pictures were exhibited at the Galerie Sedelmeyer, Paris, from April 19 to June 15, 1885, as "Quinze Tableaux sur la Femme à Paris," and at Arthur Tooth and Sons, London, in 1886 as "Pictures of Parisian Life by J.J. Tissot."
La Femme à Paris was poorly received. A critic for La Vie Parisienne complained that the women in the series were "always the same Englishwoman"—some say the faces all resembled Kathleen Newton. Another reviewer dismissed Tissot's modern urban women as "gracious puppets." Some found both the poses and compositions awkward and disconcerting.
Tissot made etchings only of the first five of the paintings in the series, L'Ambitieuse, Ces dames des chars, Sans dot, La Mystérieuse and La Plus jolie Femme de Paris, planning to sell sets to collectors, but they never were published.
La Plus jolie Femme de Paris, was to be written about by Edgar Degas' old schoolmate, the playwright and novelist Ludovic Halévy. In a story with that title later published, translated into English, the wife of a Parisian lawyer is determined to be the most beautiful woman in Paris-—until the next day, when a musical comedy actress becomes the focus of the fickle public's attention," (Paquette, "Tissot's La Femme à Paris series," The Hammock, 2013). Wentworth 81.
