'... his works are among the most revealing visual documents of the nineteenth century, brilliantly conveying the mood of the Victorian era while subtly hinting at the routine and tedium of 'the season'.
As the title makes clear, The Proposal is a romance between two lovers. On the threshold, literally and symbolically, stands a beautiful young girl and her suave suitor. We can imagine that the air is filled with the fragrance of climbing jasmine and geraniums blooming on the sunlit veranda. A wide striped canopy has been lowered to protect the porcelain-white skin of the young woman who has been enjoying this perfect summer day in the shade. Her handsome suitor has taken this idyllic moment to ask for her hand in marriage. She has demurely turned from him so that she can keep her excitement to herself and she can consider her future life. A coy smile is crossing her rouged lips and her blue eyes are opening wide; it seems likely that her answer will be positive and his nonchalant stance suggests that he is confident of her acceptance. The door stands open and although Tissot was not an artist prone to symbolism, the suggestion of matrimony as she moves into the comfortably upholstered domestic setting, is clear.
In the opening years of the 1870s Tissot himself was at the threshold of momentous change in his own life. In 1870 he was comfortably and complacently living in Paris – successful, wealthy and popular with a glittering career laid out before him. However, in 1871 Count Bismark and his Prussian army brought the empire of Napoleon III to its knees and as Tissot had associated himself with the Commune he was under serious threat of arrest and execution when troops stormed the city in May that year. He hurriedly packed his belongings and fled as 25,000 Communards were slaughtered in the streets, arriving in London in June with only a hundred francs in his pocket. He faced the challenge of rebuilding his life, his reputation and his financial stability with only his talents to assist him – but his talents were considerable and he was soon prosperous again. He was not unknown in London as he had exhibited a few pictures at the Royal Academy and other English galleries in the 1860s. He also had several friends he could turn to for support and for introductions to patrons. One of the closest of these friends was Thomas Gibson Bowles, editor of Vanity Fair magazine, to whose home at Queen’s Gate Tissot immediately appeared after arriving in London; he stayed for several months until he could find a permanent place to live. Bowles gave Tissot his first London commission, for twenty-four caricatures of high-ranking politicians for illustrations in his magazine. This gave Tissot the stability he needed and with Bowles’ and other friends’ support he soon began painting again with a renewed energy and a new way of looking at the world. He cast off his preoccupation with painting rather sentimental Directoire subjects set in early Nineteenth Century France and concentrated on the contemporary world around him – the pretty shop-girls and debutantes with their demi-dramas and everyday rituals.
We can be sure that The Proposal was among the first pictures painted in London, rather than begun in Paris and finished later, as it is painted on a canvas made by the London manufacturers George Rowney & Sons. It is signed and dated L.1872.
It has all the fresh qualities of the subjects that Tissot painted in his new home city. Tissot’s work for Vanity Fair brought him to the attention of an elite and fashionable audience and his first pictures painted in London depicted the young, wealthy and fashionable, treating their domestic and romantic encounters, as his biographer Michael Wentworth has described:
With all the sharp observation of an outsider and all the cleverness of a born dramatist. He gave his new pictures broad comic anecdote, sentimental flourish, or a tinge of moral meaning, as the case required, and in his first English pictures, Georgian Dolly Vardens and officers who are clearly also gentlemen replace the disreputable merveilleuses and incroyables of his Directoire subjects in briskly witty narratives, while in modern genre the formidable creature the French then called the English Miss supplants Parisian widows and soubrettes playing at connoisseurship in domestic scenes that make their predecessors seem almost comically sophisticated.
Both in Paris and in London Tissot surrounded himself with a salon of painters, writers and influential men and women and his acute acumen for business and flair for self-publicity helped him to become one of the most notable artists of his generation. He loved city life and sought to reflect the events and atmosphere of the higher echelon social scene that he rapidly became an important member of Parisian gratin and later, London society. In London he eventually adopted the anglicized name 'James', perhaps to attract British patrons, which is indicative of his enthusiasm for self-promotion. The painter Louise Jopling recalled Tissot as 'a charming man, very handsome, extra-ordinarily like the Duke of Teck... always well groomed, and had nothing of artistic carelessness either in his dress or demeanour.' In London it was noted that he kept a beautifully manicured garden and pristine studio with iced champagne always available in order to impress his patrons – it was even reported that a visitor had witnessed a servant dressed in Eighteenth Century livery polishing the leaves of his plants. 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. His success in London annoyed many British artists and critics who felt that he was a foreigner painting English subjects with no right to do so but financially Tissot was in a better position than he had been in Paris. In 1872, the year The Proposal was painted, Tissot earned 94,515 francs, almost two and a half times his best earnings in France.
During the fourteen years that Tissot lived in London the majority of his work was a series of pictures of his mistress Kathleen Newton in the sumptuous interiors and garden of his studio house at Grove End Road in St John’s Wood. But this was all to come in the future - he did not buy the Grove End Road property until 1873 and he did not meet Kathleen until 1875 or 1876. In 1872 he was living at 73 Springfield Road in St John’s Wood and we can presume that the painting depicts a room there (the house is no longer extant). The models for The Proposal are not known, but this does not matter because unlike the pictures of Kathleen that very much depicted the artist’s life with his beloved model, these first London pictures were intended to be more generic romances into which Tissot’s audience could place themselves. These were paintings to make the heart flutter and to pose questions about what narratives are unfolding before us, whereas the paintings of Kathleen were more biographical.
Tissot’s desire to appeal to fashionable Londoners can be seen in his choice of costume here. The girl’s cream tea-gown, buttoned at the front and fringed with tassels, must have belonged to Tissot as it appears in other paintings. Another model wears it in Waiting for the Train (Willesden Junction) exhibited in 1872 (Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand) and also the contemporary A Visit to the Yacht (Fig. 1, Sotheby’s, London, 4 December 2013, lot 47) painted on the Thames from another young woman. Tissot excelled in depicting the contrasting textures of fabrics and surfaces in his paintings but his knowledge of fashion added a glamorous sophistication. He had grown up surrounded by elegantly dressed women as his mother and aunt owned a millinery company in Nantes and his father had been a linen merchant. His interest in female dress is exemplified by the finery of the costume worn by the beautiful model in The Proposal whose corset and bustle give her an elegant ‘hour-glass’ figure. Flowers placed in her beautifully-coiffed hair add to the elegance but also suggest the hand of her beloved, who we may wonder has placed them there as they have walked in the sunlit garden.
Technically superb, Tissot’s style of drawing and painting was based upon the academic manner espoused by the Salon, but his subjects tended to be modern and personal. He is celebrated for his depictions of the manners and customs of the newly rich Victorian middle classes and their fashions of dress and decoration. His pictures present a glorious, splendid panorama of the genteel world of Paris and London and beneath the surface charm they communicate the ennui, tensions and ambiguities of Nineteenth Century society.
Although Tissot would perhaps not now be described as an Impressionist painter, it is interesting to note the close relationships he had with many of the main artists of the group in Paris. Degas was a close friend in Paris and in 1874 he invited Tissot to take part in one of the most important exhibitions of the later nineteenth century, the first exhibition of the work of the Impressionists. Degas wrote to his friend; 'Look here, my dear Tissot, no hesitations, no escape. You positively must exhibit at The Boulevard. It will do you good... and us too.' However, by this time Tissot's career in London was expanding and perhaps fearing that this could be jeopardized by associations with the renegade French artists, he decided not to submit a picture to the exhibition. However he maintained close friendships with the Impressionists, meeting regularly with Whistler in London and traveling to Venice with Manet in 1874, the same year that Berthe Morisot visited him in London.
Cherished in a private collection since 1950 The Proposal was relatively unknown to scholars and the wider audience until 2013 when it was loaned to the Cleveland Museum of Art to hang in the French portrait gallery while the museum's Tissot was on loan. The painting is not mentioned in James Laver’s biography of 1936 or any of the records of Tissot’s life that followed. It was also not included in Willard Misfeld’s book The Albums of James Tissot which recorded many of the ‘lost’ Tissot paintings, known only from contemporary photographs taken from Tissot’s albums of his work – the volume of the albums which included this painting was also lost (this album has since been found). The painting’s whereabouts were not known when the Barbican Art Gallery’s important Tissot exhibition was held in 1984 or the exhibition held in Japan four years later. In 1990, the study for the painting surfaced but, without an illustration of The Proposal for comparison, it was catalogued as A Pensive Lady in an Interior (Sotheby’s, New York, 26 October 1990, lot 134). The painting was first displayed in a Tissot exhibit in 2019 at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco at its sumptuous Tissot exhibition and was illustrated for the first time in color in the catalogue. Its rediscovery adds greatly to the canon of known work that Tissot painted in his first years in London and shows the artist in a light-hearted and optimistic mood.
In the early 1950s, the painting was proudly displayed in the windows of Brodney Gallery in Boston, when Terry and her mother spotted it and instantly fell in love with it. A young graduate with a keen eye for fine art, Terry convinced her mother to enter the gallery and purchase the painting, as both were enchanted with it. Thus, The Proposal began its long stay in Terry's family until finally entered Terry and Ralph Kovel's collection more than 50 years ago.
Ralph and Terry Kovel, hailed as “the duke and duchess of the antiques world,” have written more than 100 books and special reports about collecting. Their publications include a national paid circulation newsletter, Kovels On Antiques & Collectibles. Their bylined column is the longest running nationally syndicated weekly column still written by the original author. Their guides include the annual Kovel's Antiques & Collectibles Price Guide, which has sold over 4 million copies since its first edition.
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Ralph Kovel passed away in 2008.