When it emerged in 1999 and was included in a major exhibition of Tissot’s work, The Hammock was hailed as a highly significant rediscovery of a large and important painting lost for 120 years. The Hammock had previously been known from a photograph in the albums kept by Tissot as a record of his artistic production and was often cited as embodying the artist’s principle focus of the 1870s – to capture the care-free joie de vie of domestic and romantic bliss. The Hammock was painted at the confluence of Tissot’s artistic career as well as his emotional life in London when he achieved a brief and fragile balance between art and life that was soon to be tragically shattered.
‘Tissot’s view of art was extremely literal. And he was best at simply painting what he saw... More than most nineteenth century artists, Tissot used the basic materials of his own life and surroundings to create his pictures, particularly during the period of his love-affair with Kathleen Newton.’
Although Tissot had initially exhibited at the Royal Academy following his move to London, in the mid-1870s he shifted his allegiance to the more radical Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street where he probably felt his paintings would be better appreciated for its own considerable qualities. His work was moving away from the story-telling pictures of his youth, to the pure painting of some of his French and British contemporaries. He was more comfortable exhibiting alongside Burne-Jones and Whistler and at the Grosvenor he hoped that the public would begin to understand his aims – they had been torn by an admiration for his technical skill and a lack of comprehension of a seemingly unidentifiable ‘subject’. Alongside Whistler and Albert Moore, Tissot hoped to exhibit paintings essentially without subjects but inspired by his new infatuation, a beautiful woman who had entered his life in 1876. The Hammock was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879 and was one of the largest pictures that Tissot painted of an idyllic subject which could be described as dolce far niente (the sweetness of doing nothing). It depicts an earthly paradise in which a young woman in a black dress relaxes in a Brazilian hammock while holding a magnificent Japanese paper parasol to protect her from the sun. It is a symphony in gold and black which recalls the Oriental lacquer-work that he had long admired and had been the subject of pictures including Young Women Looking at Japanese Objects of 1869 (Cincinnati Art Museum). This pared-down colour scheme and Oriental elements also reflects the parallel objectives of Tissot, Whistler and Moore. The dreamy eroticism, Oriental decoration and colour scheme of The Hammock may be compared to Moore’s Summer Night of 1887 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). At the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879 Tissot also exhibited A Quiet Afternoon (private collection) which depicts the same subject but seen from a different viewpoint – The Hammock being the view that the male figure in A Quiet Afternoon would see.
Tissot had hoped to charm the critics and the public with his chic depiction of summer languor in a London garden but his hopes were dashed as critical response was scathing. The correspondent for Spectator summarised the problem; ‘these ladies in hammocks, showing a very unnecessary amount of petticoat and stocking, and remarkable for little save a sort of luxurious indolence and insolence, are hardly fit subjects for such elaborate painting.’ This criticism of elements which now make the painting intriguing and beguiling rather than the opposite, seems to stem from a distrust of Tissot’s subject-matter at this time which was focused on his depiction of one woman who appeared repeatedly. The critics and exhibition visitors perceived an intimacy that they were not comfortable to witness – a sensuality inspired by deep love and attraction between the artist and his muse. Spectator’s readers were perhaps not quite ready for the sight of Kathleen’s leather boot peeping provocatively from the frills of her lace petticoat or the suggestion that she is being so closely observed while she is in such a state of languid repose. The Hammock did not find a buyer at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879 and it was a further three years before he sold it, according to his record of sales, to Richard Sims Donkin. Donkin was a partner in Nelson, Donkin & Co steamships who was elected Member of Parliament for the newly created constituency of Tynemouth in the 1885 general election, a position he held until 1900 when he stepped-down. Donkin also owned another painting by Tissot, Quiet of 1881 (collection of Andrew Lloyd Webber).
The Hammock plays to the idea of luxury and idle languor both with the female figure absorbed in her reading and the dog sprawled on the lawn, exhausted by chasing the ball. The oriental parasol, bamboo side-table and rush-matting add to the exoticism and emphasise the chic fashion of the image. The casually cast-aside book has the pale yellow paper cover associated with British novels and 'sensational' fiction a subject which recurs repeatedly through Tissot’s pictures featuring Kathleen is leisure and she is often lounging, idly reading or listlessly daydreaming.
‘The warm silence and the dolce far niente that pervade it are nothing less than the purely visual proof of Henry James’s assertion that ‘summer afternoon’ is the most evocative phrase in the English language.’
It is clear that The Hammock is a potently intimate depiction of a woman with whom the artist who painted her was completely besotted. He has observed her at ease, relaxed in quiet thought as she reads her newspaper in the warmth of the summer sun, the only noises being the gentle rustle of the sycamore leaves and birdsong. Just as the dog is absorbed in contented slumber, the human companions are totally at ease with each other (one depicted and the other implied).
The setting of The Hammock is Tissot’s garden in St. John’s Wood, which included a rose arbour and distinctive pool with a cast iron crescent-shaped colonnade copied from a marble original in the Parc Monceau in Paris. In Victorian London the maintenance of such an elaborate garden was very much a sign of affluence; one of the stories told among Tissot’s friends back in Paris was that he was such a success that he had servants in white gloves polishing the leaves of his shrubs.
Tissot’s garden was the setting for many of his pictures and his model was invariably Kathleen Newton. Kathleen was born in 1854 to Flora and Charles Frederick Ashburnham Kelly in Agra, India, where her father worked as an accountant for the British East India Company. She was sent to school in England with her older sister Mary Pauline, returning to India in 1870 for an arranged marriage to Dr. Isaac Newton, a distinguished army surgeon and widower twice Kathleen’s age. The marriage took place in January 1871 but Kathleen had fallen in love with a naval captain during the voyage east and left her new husband, who instituted divorce proceedings when she admitted her infidelity on her wedding night. Sent back to England, Kathleen gave birth to a daughter, Muriel Violet Mary Newton, in December 1871, and later a son, Cecil George, in March 1876. Nothing is known about Kathleen’s whereabouts or life between the two births. She came into Tissot’s life during the latter part of 1876 and it was said that they met when she was posting a letter in a street close to Tissot’s home in St John’s Wood. For the next few happy years Tissot’s paintings were dominated by Kathleen’s appearance in various domestic settings. The first certain depiction of Kathleen by Tissot is the etched Portrait of M. N., dated 1876. Kathleen came to live with Tissot in 1877, the year of his etching Mavourneen, which means “my darling” or “my dear one” in Irish, popularized in the song Kathleen Mavourneen. Tissot’s French friends described her as la ravissante Irlandaise. Tissot and Newton were both Roman Catholics, so were unable to marry but they lived as man and wife at Tissot’s London house in Grove End Road, St John’s Wood, with ‘their own little literary and artistic circles, in which the absence of a conventional wedding ring made no difference,’ according to Lilian Hervey, Newton’s niece. Newton’s two young children continued to live, and share a nanny, with their cousins at the home of Newton’s sister, a few minutes’ walk away in Hill Road, visiting Newton and Tissot for teatime picnics, piano songs, storytelling and play. Tissot depicted the children in many of his pictures. The black-and white collie dog also appears in several pictures set both indoors and out, including Quiet (National Museums Northern Ireland).
Although Newton would only live for a few more years, we are aware that in this very moment - captured for eternity - love and happiness seem invincible to her. Tragically domestic bliss was short-lived for the pair and on 9 November 1882 she died of consumption aged only twenty-eight. Tissot was devastated and prayed for hours beside her purple-velvet draped coffin, bereft with grief. She was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, and unable to tolerate the thought of life in London without her, Tissot immediately left for Paris, leaving behind him his brushes and paints, his unfinished canvases and the ghost of his beloved Kathleen.
We are very grateful to Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz for her additions and amendments to this catalogue note.