James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot

During the first half of his career, Tissot demonstrated little interest in religious themes.   Although his popular series of paintings and engravings The Return of the Prodigal Son and Departure recounted a Biblical story, they lacked any historical accuracy or spiritual feeling, rendering an allegorical rather than a theological narrative.  It was not until the 1880s that a more devoted religiosity energized Tissot’s art, resulting in the 1895 Paris exhibition of a set of 365 New Testament biblical illustrations.

Tissot scholars have long debated the motivations behind this move toward religious painting.  At the most practical level, the illustrations provided a profitable source of income; the Catholic revival in France and beyond created a lucrative demand for illustrations, touring exhibitions, and museum acquisitions.  More personally, Tissot suffered the death of his beloved companion and model, Kathleen Newton in 1882.  Finding comfort in the church, Tissot attended mass at St. Sulpice in Paris.  It was during one such ceremony that he experienced a mystical vision.  In his well-publicized account, he saw Christ as “a strange figure gliding”   toward a “peasant and his wife” who tells the couple, “I have been more miserable than you; I am the solution to all your problems; without me civilization is a ruin.” (Tissot as quoted in Christopher Wood, Tissot: The Life of Jacques Joseph Tissot, 1836-1902, Boston, 1986, p 143).  From this moment Tissot knew it was his responsibility to record his visions.  In addition, he was soon attending séances held by British spiritualist William Eglinton; full of smoke, chants and fainting guests, these meetings served to reveal the nature of the subconscious to Tissot, and sparked a near-obsession with the supernatural aspects of his religion.   

While not included in the definitive New Testament cycle, The Sacred Fire (modern day title) is associated with the cycle both in composition and meaning.  The tangled masses of convulsing men closely resemble the rabbis of The Dead Appear in the Temple (The Brooklyn Museum of Art).  Indeed, The Sacred Fire perhaps describes an element of the Paschal (Passover) service, in which frenzied, sacrificial rites concluded with the burning of an offering--a tradition that continued in some form beyond Biblical times.  As with The Dead Appear in the Temple, Tissot clothes the rabbis in white linen robes which represent earth; the purple, blue and red robe sashes equate sea, air and fire respectively (Nancy Rose Marshall and Malcolm Warner, James Tissot: Modern Painter/Modern Love, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1999, p. 182).  The painstaking detail in the robes as well as the rabbis' fevered faces evidence Tissot’s work from photographs and posed models. To make his own illustrations as realistic as possible, he traveled to the Middle East in 1885, 1889 and 1896, visiting Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. He was interested in observing and recording the region's modern inhabitants, as he believed that these people and their culture had not changed since the Biblical era.  In various expressions of anguish and ecstasy, the rabbis' faces clone one another, while their over-crossing arms and legs nearly create a single figure. Tissot's mastery of gouache allows for a clear reproduction of detail while also permitting the free-flowing brushwork of the red-pink flames and tossed hair to suggest a deeper, wilder emotion. 

It is this unavoidable emotional power of The Sacred Fire that demonstrates Tissot’s belief in the spiritual function and power of his work.  As a contemporary noted, Tissot “destroyed a devotional picture when a Parisian woman called it a masterpiece; by the third version of the work, the woman fell to her knees to pray, and Tissot was satisfied” (Marshall and Warner, p. 163).  Accordingly, the press often claimed that though small in scale the intimate nature of these dramatic scenes, inspired hysterics in exhibition visitors or fainting spells to those who stopped by his studio.  And the power of the images continued long after their debut. The potent mix of religion and science in The Sacred Fire placed Tissot in a tradition of artists working within a state of very modern spirituality, while ultimately foreshowing the late nineteenth century Symbolist movements of Eugène Carrière, Odilon Redon and the Nabis, and even predicting the Surrealists of the next century.