James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot

Sale: Sotheby's, London, November 14, 1973, lot 36, illustrated
Private Collection, Australia
Theodore Bruce, Adelaide (and sold: Christie's, London, November 20, 1984, lot 100, illustrated)
Owen Edgar Gallery, London (until circa 1988)
Private Collector, Virginia (acquired from the above)
Sale: Christie's, New York, May 25, 1995, lot 99, illustrated
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Willard Misfeldt, James Jacques Joseph Tissot: A Bio-Critical Study, Ann Arbor, 1971, p. 187
Michael Wentworth, James Tissot, Catalogue Raisonné of his Prints, Minneapolis, 1978, pp. 142, 145, illustrated no 31c
Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, ed., James Tissot, Oxford, 1984, p. 117
Michael Wentworth, James Tissot, Oxford, 1984, p. 143, n. 48
Philip Hook and Mark Poltimore, Popular 19th Century Painting, A Dictionary of European Genre Painters, Suffolk, 1986, p. 76, illustrated
Christopher Wood, Tissot: The Life and Work of Jacques-Joseph Tissot, 1836-1902, Boston, 1986, p. 105, illustrated p. 104, no. 104
Willard Misfeldt, J.J. Tissot: Prints from the Gotlieb Collection, Alexandria, 1991, p. 78

James Tissot painted Mavourneen in 1877 as one of the earliest known portraits of Kathleen Newton, the model, companion and muse who had entered the artist's life the previous year and would go on to propel his creative inspiration until her untimely death in 1882.  Mavourneen is an Irish expression translatable as 'my darling' or 'my dear one' and was certainly an appropriate recognition of Kathleen's place in the artist's affections. Tissot's use of the popular term for the title of this picture (more precisely, for his etching that reproduces the present painting, fig. 1) allowed him to emphasize the mood of the striking composition over the specific identity of the sitter.  In fact, Kathleen Newton's name was only attached to the picture many years later. 

Wearing an exquisite embroidered coat with fur trim at collar and cuff, Kathleen is posed in a window, silhouetted against a linen shade and small glimpses of autumnal chestnut leaves. Tissot was particularly fond of presenting his models against conservatory windows or doorways, as such devices allowed great potential for contrasts between inside and outside, near and far, coming and going that overlaid simple images of feminine beauty with myriad anecdotal possibilities.  Obsessed as Tissot was with elaborate color and pattern schemes, the window frames gave him a means to suggest a more complex story-line (in keeping with popular demand during the Victorian era) than he necessarily intended.  As a pictorial strategy that Tissot shared with Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas (friends and colleagues from his days in Paris), the window or door enclosure conveyed an aura of modernity, the sense of a subject accidentally and privately glimpsed and unaware of the artist (fig. 2).  For Mavourneen, Tissot cropped his composition especially closely.  The emphasis on the hem of the shade, the length of the tasseled pull and the stepping of the window jamb all contrast with the softness of Kathleen's costume and the tactile suggestions of the embroidery, fur, feathers and wispy hair.  Not only is the young lady moving out of the accidental picture frame; she is also taking all the fullness of the composition with her.

For nearly seventy years, the model for Mavourneen and so many of Tissot's later images of elegant family picnics, poignant scenes of contemplative parting, and abstracted feminine beauty was unknown outside Tissot's immediate circle of familiars.  Occasionally entitled "la mystérieuse" or "la belle irlandandaise," Kathleen Irene Ashburnham Kelly was only accorded her full identity in a pair of 1940s magazine articles based on the reminiscences of Kathleen's then-very-aged niece.  Kathleen was 23 when she posed for Tissot in Mavourneen, a divorced young mother of two illegitimate children.  Daughter of Anglo-Irish parents, she had been sent off to India for an arranged marriage with an older British civil servant named Newton when she was only sixteen.  During the oceanic crossing, she fell in love, married nonetheless, bore an illegitimate child, was shipped back to England, was divorced, and became dependent upon a married sister, all in roughly a year.  Somewhere along the line she contracted tuberculosis.  Presumably Kathleen met Tissot when she and her children moved into her sister's home near the artist's house and studio in the  St. John's Wood district.  Kathleen continued to use Newton's name after her divorce and what Tissot actually knew of the tragic refugee's life is not recorded.  But she soon became his principal model, often along with her children.  She moved into Tissot's home and for five years she provided the centering force in the world of "a man who obviously adored her" as Misfeldt has so aptly remarked.

Throughout the nineteenth century, a very popular ballad entitled Kathleen Mavoureen kept the image of a beautiful young Irish woman and tragic parting alive in the public imagination.  In 1866, William Travers wrote a rather silly play to fill out the vague lyrics and capitalize on the well known song.  That play (in which an expensive cloak plays an important role) was revived on the London stage in 1876 at roughly the moment Tissot met Kathleen.  The painter's adoption of the title Mavourneen might well be no more than a softly ironic reference to the magnificent coat in which his Kathleen posed; equally, the title may be a recognition of the role she had already won in his life.  That something of Kathleen Kelly Newton's story may have been known outside the Tissot circle is suggested by the publication in 1878 of Frances Hodgson Burnett's serialized novelette, Kathleen Mavourneen, in which an American painter is swept off his feet by a rather ill-used young girl, whom he privately calls Kathleen Mavourneen, eventually to have his heroine and his love vindicated after trial by tribulation and scarlet fever. 

Contemporary with the painting of Mavourneen, Tissot produced the same image in an etching, the most successful print he ever published.  In addition, Kathleen posed wearing the same hat and coat, walking away from the artist and audience and silhouetted against an entire background of golden-orange chestnut leaves for two paintings, both entitled October, the larger now in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the smaller in a private collection (fig. 3).  Finally, another etching, entitled La Frileuse (the shivering one), varies the poses of Mavourneen.