James Tissot

Acquired from the artist by Agnew’s, London, 18 June 1873 as La Visite au Navire

Purchased from Agnew’s, Liverpool on 3 November 1873, by David Jardine of Highlea, Beaconsfield Road, Woolton, Liverpool

Vicars Brothers at Christie’s, London, 3 April 1922, lot 75

Purchased from the Leicester Galleries by William Hulme Lever, 2^nd Lord Leverhulme in 1933 and thence by descent

London, Leicester Galleries, 'In the Seventies'- An Exhibition of paintings by James Tissot, 1933, no.8

Port Sunlight, Lady Lever Art Gallery, The Pre-Raphaelites – Their Friends and Followers – Centenary Exhibition, 1948, no.197

London, Christie’s, Treasures of the North, 2000, no.72.

James Laver, ‘Vulgar Society’ – The Romantic Career of James Tissot 1836-1902, 1936, pp.45-6, illustrated as plate XXIV

Michael Wentworth, James Tissot, 1984, p.106.

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar Ltd., 13 & 14 Mason's Yard, Duke Street, St James', London, SW1Y 6BY: UNCONDITIONAL AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE Structural Condition The canvas is unlined and is providing a sound and secure structural support. Paint Surface The paint surface has an even but discoloured varnish layer and should respond very well to cleaning and revarnishing. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows a very small spot of retouching in the lower left of the composition and other small retouchings around the framing edges, most of which are undoubtedly larger than is really necessary and could be reduced if removed during the cleaning process. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in excellent and stable condition and should respond very well to cleaning and revarnishing.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

THE VISCOUNTS LEVERHULME

The nineteenth century produced some remarkable and inspiring men whose wealth was the reward for a lifetime of labour in an age of opportunity like no other. William Hesketh Lever, 1^st Viscount Leverhulme (1851-1925) was one such man, a self-made industrialist who was arguably the greatest of his generation. He made a fortune by producing a commodity that everyone needed – soap, and it was with the proceeds of this industry that he enthusiastically indulged his passions for philanthropy and fine art.

Leverhulme was the archetypal industrialist, recalled in 1937 as: ‘Short and thickset in stature, with a sturdy body set on short legs and a massive head covered with thick, upstanding hair, he radiated force and energy. He had piercing blue-grey humorous eyes, which, however, flashed with challenge when he was angry. A strong, thin lipped mouth, set about on a slightly receding chin, and the short neck and closely set ears of a prize fighter. He possessed great physical strength and a gift of sleep which was always available at his command. His dress was always the same. A grey tweed suit, a Victorian-fashioned collar with a carelessly worn made-up tie, and a tall grey hat.’ (Sir Angus Watson, My Life, 1937)

Born in Bolton in north Lancashire in 1851, the year that The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations opened at the Crystal Palace, William Hesketh Lever was very much the product of the industrial age. The son of a successful wholesale grocer, he had the advantage of a good education until he was sixteen, when he was apprenticed to his father’s business. By the age of twenty-one, he had risen to become a junior partner with a healthy salary of £800 per annum and was engaged to be married to his childhood sweetheart, Eliza Hulme. In the next few years he expanded the family business, supplying grocers with fresh eggs and butter from Ireland and northern France and also branched into soap manufacture with a factory firstly in Warrington and then in Port Sunlight. Soap production on an industrial scale was in its infancy, but was burgeoning as the rapidly growing population of towns and cities filled with billowing factories began to wash more regularly. Seeing a gap in the market for soap that was affordable to everyone and that would lather in any type of water, Lever quickly made a fortune. His new recipe for soap patented as ‘Sunlight Soap’ was marketed aggressively and widely and the business grew rapidly, outselling all other brands. In 1886 the Warrington factory was producing twenty tons of soap every week and two years later the output had expanded to four hundred and fifty tons. By 1896 nearly 40,000 tons of soap left Lever’s factory and with few possibilities of expansion in its current location, Lever moved his operation to Port Sunlight on the Wirral peninsula where the domination of the soap business continued apace. At the turn of the next century Lever opened factories across the British Empire, Germany and Switzerland.

Fundamental to Sunlight Soap’s success was Lever himself, the driving force of his company who possessed an almost inexhaustible energy and commercial genius. Indicative of Viscount Leverhulme’s character is the fact that he slept in an open air bed on the rooftop above the grand rooms of his beautiful home, with only a simple canopy to protect him from the ravages of wind, snow and rain. Every day, without fail, the tough and energetic industrialist would rise at 4.30am and plunge into a cold marble bath to prepare him for the day ahead running his global empire and his philanthropic enterprises. However he was consumed with a passion for one great luxury – the accumulation of beautiful works of art from exquisite and delicate ceramics to the best examples of Napoleonic furniture and masterpieces of British art. Amid the grandeur of the rooms of Thornton Manor, beneath Lever’s simple outdoor bedroom, he showcased the beautiful works of art that he collected as one of the greatest private assemblages in the country.

Like Lever himself, his collection of art and antiques had modest origins and began quietly with the acquisition in 1870 of a Derby biscuit group of a shepherd and shepherdess. However his artistic ambitions soon grew in earnest, and in the 1880s he began to approach contemporary Victorian art from a commercial perspective with an eye keen for marketing. Following the lead of T.J. Barratt of A. & F. Pears, who had capitalized on using Victorian paintings for advertisements, Lever excerpted images from popular, contemporary works such as William Powell Frith’s New Frock and used them as the foundation for soap advertisements. Lever, aware that the market for his products was the rapidly growing lower-middle class, found a lucrative affinity between the naturalistic imagery of the Newlyn School painters and the desires of his buyers.  After considerable protest from some artists, including Frith, Lever modified his approach and purchased relatively more sophisticated paintings to reproduce as promotional prizes for dedicated customers. The paintings from this early period are representative of an aspirational Victorian middle class yearning for cleanliness, simplicity and romanticized nostalgia.

With an insatiable appetite for beauty, deep-pockets and the opportunities to purchase some of the greatest examples of Victorian art as the first generation of collectors began to pass-away, Leverhulme’s collection grew both in number of objects and in their quality. The crowning glories of the picture collection were Lord Leighton’s magnificent processional celebration of classical pomp and ceremony The Daphnephoria and the sensual The Garden of the Hesperides, Herkomer’s tragic Last Muster, Rossetti’s Sibylla Palmifera and Millais’ The Nest and Little Speedwell’s Darling. These Victorian masterpieces were accompanied by an unrivalled collection of Wedgwood Jasperware, Napoleonic furniture, Chinese snuff bottles, arms and armour, and embroidery; it was one of the most important assemblages of British art and a lasting testament to his belief in art’s power to ‘enlighten and ennoble.’

The scope of Lever’s collection was vast and multifarious - during his lifetime he acquired over 20,000 works of art - and perhaps the only true unifying factors were Lever’s love of brilliant colour, demonstrations of craftsmanship and flashes of virtuosity. Lever’s collection was spread throughout his various houses and museums, namely Thornton Manor, his London home The Hill in Hampstead and the Lady Lever Art Gallery. Both Thornton Manor and the Lady Lever Art Gallery are further architectural expressions of Lever’s taste and the blending of domestic residence and erudite museum evident in both these spaces perfectly reflects the ethos of his simultaneously personal and public collection.

Lever’s acquisition in 1913 of works from the modern art collection of the mining engineer George McCulloch furnished him with Luke Fildes’ An Al-fresco Toilette and Leighton’s The Garden of the Hesperides. These purchases signified his new tendency to purchase works of art with the formation of a museum in mind and soon after the McCulloch sale, Lever was inspired to construct a new museum to house these treasures. He began to make plans for the purpose-built Lady Lever Art Gallery. In 1917 the executors of George Rae’s estate sold his collection of pictures at Christie’s. From the sale William Hesketh Lever bought several works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Sibylla Palmifera (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), a watercolour version of Venus Verticordia, Death of Breuze (private collection), Fight for a Woman (Detroit Institute of Fine Arts), Salutation of Beatrice (Fogg Art Museum) and the present A Christmas Carol. He paid a total of £2,500 – a sign of the steep decline in the popularity of Pre-Raphaelite art in the early twentieth century.

The Lady Lever Art Gallery, which took the place of Lever’s earlier Port Sunlight art gallery, housed in Hulme Hall, was in keeping with a distinctly American practice of building galleries around business tycoons’ impressive collections and allowing the public access to these works.  Lever also modelled the architecture of the gallery on the classical lines of other American museums, but displayed a particular sensitivity to the surrounding country village, keeping the ceilings low and the accents simple, so as not to dominate the landscape. The conception of the Lady Lever Art Gallery also had a touchingly personal note for Lever and was constructed and named in the memory of his late wife. Although arguably many of the paintings and objets d’art housed in the Lady Lever Art Gallery were purchased with an institutional setting in mind, Lever never lost his personal connections with the art or artists. Lever was particularly attuned to the provenance of his works; he pursued a Regency silver wine cooler that had once been owned by Charles Dickens, and bought a pair of Chinese blue-and-white flasks previously owned by Ford Madox Brown and Rossetti. He purchased works collected by Rossetti and Alma-Tadema as a demonstration of friendship and support, held lunches and dinners for members of the Royal Academy, and played a prominent role in establishing the Faculty of Arts in London.  These later years also saw the codification of Lever’s artistic philosophies – the man who had once seen Frith’s sweetly nostalgic images of Victorian daily life as marketable opportunities now vociferously promoted the social and moral components of art, arguing that uplifting images were beneficial to the community. Lever dismissed the aesthetic ‘art for art’s sake’, and instead proposed an art for the sake of the people.

When Lever died in 1925, many of the pictures that remained in his personal possession were sold over a period of forty-five days in auction houses in London and New York and many of these have fallen from view. The Trustees of the Lady Lever Art Gallery, in possession of a substantial endowment, were able to purchase paintings in concordance with Lever’s collecting practices and as the popularity of Victorian art was at a low ebb, many purchases were secured for low prices. Today, the gallery with its diverse collection of paintings, furniture, tapestries, Wedgwood, Chinese ceramics, and sculpture, speaks to Lever’s unshakeable belief that ‘art and the beautiful civilize and elevate.’

A proportion of the 1st Viscount’s collection passed to his son William Hulme Lever, 2^nd Viscount Leverhulme (1888-1949) with Thornton Manor, including Rossetti's  A Christmas Carol. Having spent his childhood at Thornton before attending Eton and Cambridge University in 1925, he returned to live there permanently with his first wife Marion Beatrice Smith, daughter of Bryce Smith. Having graduated in 1913 with a Masters degree in the Arts, he shared his father’s love of antiques and added to the collection of Victorian art, notably with the purchase of William Holman Hunt’s Tuscan Girl Plaiting Straw in 1931 and A Visit to the Yacht by James Tissot two years later. He also inherited his father’s business drive and was a co-founder of Unilever in 1930 when Lever Brothers merged with Margarine Unie.

After his father’s death, Thornton Manor and its collection passed to the 3^rd Viscount Leverhulme, Philip William Bryce Lever (1915-2000), who concentrated his energy on running the estate. He had served in the Middle East and the Cheshire Yeomanry and after WWII he was made an Honorary Colonel. He was well-known as a keen sportsman and when he made his first speech in the House of Lords (given twenty-seven years after he gained his right to speak there) the subject was horse-racing; he was a Senior Steward of the Jockey Club and the owner of several winners. After his death in 2000, without a male heir, the Leverhulme titles became extinct and Thornton Manor and much of the contents were offered in a sale of 1,287 lots at Sotheby’s, but the paintings by Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Tissot have remained in the care of the Leverhulme Trustees until now.

 

 

 

'In the early 1870s Tissot's knowledge of nautical paraphernalia and his consummate skill in painting stylish women in exquisite costumes were turned to successful advantage with a sequence of works featuring both motifs, set principally in Thames locations.' Russell Ash, James Tissot, 1995, opposite plate 15.

  

Tissot arrived in London in the summer of 1871 and almost from the first he was drawn to the river Thames as a subject for his elegant paintings. Perhaps the water and the associated sounds and sights of the bustling docks reminded him of his childhood in the seaport of Nantes, or maybe he realised that painting life at the edge of the river opened a wealth of subjects for him to explore and attract a new audience. In the nineteenth century the Thames was central to London’s growing industrial and commercial successes, both the real and symbolic heart of the nation. Tissot’s choice of the stretch of bustling commercial docksides between Tower Bridge and Greenwich had immediate appeal for an English audience who wanted modern images of the exciting times in which they lived. He was following in the footsteps of his friend James McNeill Whistler who had painted extensively in Wapping and Rotherhithe.

In A Visit to the Yacht the figures are assembled on the deck of a boat, framed by a network of masts and ropes. The sky is overcast and sombre and the women carry scarves and are wearing gloves, elements which perhaps suggest that the scene is set in the colder months of the year. At the centre of the composition is a beautiful woman in an ivory gown trimmed in white, her face behind a gossamer veil that protects her delicate skin from the smoky atmosphere of London’s docks. In her elegant hands she holds a pair of binoculars but her attention has been distracted by a handsome young man who languorously leans his body towards her as they whisper to one another. Perhaps he is divulging a secret or making romantic overtones to her, although his lackadaisical demeanour and expression suggests an element of leisure to their flirtations. Another couple stand near-by and appear to also be engaged in close conversation. In contrast to the tensions of the romantic intrigues of the adults, a young girl in the foreground lazily rocks in a bentwood chair. She smiles openly at the spectator, her face free from the hidden messages in the expression of the beautiful woman in white. Tissot purposefully presented his audience with oblique story-telling images which suggest relationships, tensions and narratives but do not make the reading of the paintings easy. This allowed the spectator to involve themselves in the drama, a witness to the event and an interpreter of the stories as they unfold.

The apparent indifference and detachment of the figures is a familiar element of Tissot’s views of London. In Waiting for the Ferry at the Falcon Tavern c.1874 (Speed Art Museum, Kentucky), we witness a similar scene of people gathered together, almost touching one another in their close proximity and yet each looking in different directions and not reacting to one another. A chair is vacant as though a fourth member of the elegant party had just left, leaving a tension between those who remain. It is a painting of introspection, of thoughts lost on a misty horizon and of social awkwardness. Here, the barriers of the jetty, the chair struts and the architecture compounds the separation of the figures just as the rigging of the ships and the ironwork of the deck divide the figures in A Visit to the Yacht.  In his paintings of the early 1870s, enjoyable outings and activities become claustrophobic, tedious affairs. It has been suggested that this is Tissot, as a foreigner and outsider, observing English society and gently poking fun at the strict social proprieties that governed it. 

In James Laver's book of 1936, Vulgar Society - The Romantic Career of James Tissot, he suggested that A Visit to the Yacht was painted in 1879 and depicts the beautiful Irishwoman Kathleen Newton, who Tissot had met in 1876. Laver seems to have been unaware of a record in the artist’s account book for 1873, where the picture is given the French title La Visite au Navire. It was sold by Tissot to the art dealer Agnew’s for £650 and in November 1873 it was bought by the Liverpool timber broker and ship owner David Jardine.

David Jardine (1827-1911) was one of a small but significant group of art collectors in Liverpool who made their fortunes in the shipping industry and indulged their passions for modern art with the proceeds. He was a friend of another Liverpool art collector, Thomas Henry Ismay, owner of the White Star Line (of Titanic infamy) and his brother-in-law, Robert Rankin, was also a merchant ship-owner and art collector. Rankin and Jardine were both born in New Brunswick where their families made their money in the Canadian timber industry before they both moved to Liverpool. After moving to Britain, Jardine worked for Frost & Franworth and eventually became a partner. In 1880 he was a founding board director of the Cunard Steamship Company, one of the most famous shipping companies in the world; he later became its Chairman. Like Rankin and Ismay, Jardine favoured purchasing pictures from William Agnew who had a gallery in Liverpool to serve the lucrative Merseyside patrons. His collection was primarily of the work of eighteenth century British artists, Turner and Bonington and therefore A Visit to the Yacht was unusual in his collection, but not unsurprising given its subject. No doubt the provenance of a collector as famous as David Jardine was attractive to Lord Leverhulme when he bought the picture in 1933, and it is remarkable that it was in the collection of two of Merseyside's most eminent collectors and art patrons. 

It is the flags of the Union Castle line, not Cunard, that flutter in the background of A Visit to the Yacht. Tissot was a friend of the Union Castle’s Captain John Freebody (1834-99) who posed for the male figure in The Captain and the Mate (Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection) and The Last Evening (Guildhall Art Gallery, London) of 1873, which also feature Freebody’s wife Margaret Kennedy and her older brother Captain Lumley Kennedy (1919-99). Margaret also posed for The Captain's Daughter in 1873 (Southampton Art Gallery) and for several other shipboard pictures of that year. Margaret and her sister may be the models in A Visit to the Yacht and the male figure is almost certainly Freebody. Freebody had arrived on the Arundel Castle from Calcutta via New York in late February and taken command of his new iron-hulled ship Carisbrooke Castle. Tissot made sketches of the Carisbrooke Castle between March and mid-May, when the Carisbrooke sailed from the Port of London to New South Wales carrying 197 men women and children emigrating to Australia. He had made sketches the previous year aboard the Arundel Castle and it is likely that the setting for A Visit to the Yacht, Boarding the Yacht and The Captain and the Mate was the deck of the Carisbrooke whilst it was in dock at London.

The same cream dress bordered with tassels worn by the principal woman in A Visit to the Yacht appears in two pictures from 1873, The Captain and his Mate and Boarding the Yacht (where it is seen gathered into a bustle at the back).  The Captain and his Mate also includes the tartan blanket which also appears in a third contemporary work The Last Evening. The little blonde model who posed for A Visit to the Yacht is probably the Freebody's eldest daughter Constance Mary. Her younger sister, Anne Matilda, probably appears in The Last Evening, which also includes the bentwood chair. The latter is seen again in Waiting for the Ferry at the Falcon Tavern, in which she wears a similar striped dress, boater and black stockings as her older sister in A Visit to the Yacht.

At the time that A Visit to the Yacht was painted, Tissot was a close friend of Edgar Degas who painted his portrait in 1868. In 1874 Tissot was urged by Degas to take part in the first Impressionist exhibition; 'Look here, my dear Tissot, no hesitations, no escape. You positively must exhibit at the Boulevard... The realist movement no longer needs to fight with the others, it already is, it exists, it must show itself as something distinct, there must be a salon of realists... Be of your country and with your friends.' (Edgard Degas, Degas Letters, 1948, p.39) Although the costumes of Tissot's pictures, the tensions of the narratives and the complex social interplay now have a nostalgic charm, in the 1870s they were the productions of a modernist who wanted to celebrate the age in which he lived.

We are very grateful to Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz for her help with the cataloguing of this picture.