Tissot: Quiet

My name is Anne Stewart, I am Senior Curator of Art, and I am here to introduce the Ulster

Museum’s important new acquisition: A painting entitled ‘Quiet’ by the famous nineteenth

Century French artist James or Jacques Tissot.

The painting is set in a sun-lit garden and the very elegantly dressed young woman who

looks up at us from her book with an air of self-confidence and independence is Tissot’s

muse, Kathleen Newton. Seated with her niece in the garden of Tissot’s house in St. John’s

Wood in London, Kathleen Newton engages us directly with her gaze.

Born in India, of Irish parents, Kathleen’s story involves an arranged marriage, seduction,

single motherhood and her subsequent life in London as Tissot’s mistress.

Although she was the subject of many of Tissot’s most famous paintings, an air of mystery

surrounded Kathleen and Tissot referred to her in the titles of his works only as La

Mystérieuse (the mysterious girl) and La Belle Irlandaise (the beautiful Irish girl).

In fact it was not until relatively recently that the full story of Kathleen’s life became known.

Kathleen Kelly was born in 1854 to Irish parents in Agra, in India, where her father was

employed by the East India Company. When she was eight Kathleen was sent to England to

a convent boarding school, run by French nuns, and there she became fluent in French.

Kathleen returned to India at sixteen for a marriage her family had arranged with Dr Isaac

Newton, a surgeon and widower who was much older and whom she had never met.

On the voyage to India Kathleen met and fell in love with a naval officer, Captain Palliser.

On arriving in India Kathleen married Dr. Newton but immediately had regrets. The

marriage remained unconsummated and Kathleen ran away to join Palliser, and soon

afterwards became pregnant. Dr. Newton began divorce proceedings and Kathleen returned

to England, where she retained her married name of Newton. There she gave birth to a

daughter and, in 1876, to a son. In the same year she met Tissot.

Tissot was born in Nantes, in western France. He became one of the leading painters in Paris

during the 1860s and was influenced by the ideas and spirit of Impressionism.

Tissot moved to London in 1871 where he quickly became celebrated for his highly detailed

depictions of fashionable society. On a superficial level Tissot’s paintings can be viewed as a

mirror to his age, yet on closer scrutiny his magnificently dressed society women appear to

question the conventions of the world they inhabit.

In Paris Tissot was a close friend of the Impressionist painters Manet and Degas and what is

perhaps most interesting about Tissot’s painting is how he absorbed and adapted ideas

from Impressionism about what a painting should address and express.

Tissot was also a friend of the poet Charles Baudelaire, who in his Le Peintre de la Vie

Moderne of 1863 advised artists to paint the modern world, and in particular ‘the beauty

of circumstance, and the sketch of manners’. Baudelaire thought that female sitters

especially captured the spirit of the age, and certain passages from his essay appear to have

influenced Tissot’s painting of Kathleen Newton :

‘The gesture and bearing of the woman of today give to her dress a life and special

character which are not those of the woman of the past…

Each age has its own gait, glance and gesture’.

‘the woman and her dress are an indivisible unity’.

Although Tissot’s captivating portrait of Kathleen Newton was painted in London, some

twenty years after Baudelaire wrote his advice to painters, nonetheless the easy elegance,

dappled sunlight and perhaps above all the direct and challenging gaze of the sitter remain

very close to the spirit of pure French Impressionism.

Tissot frequently celebrated Kathleen’s Irish ancestry, titling one painting Mavourneen (Irish

for ‘my beloved’), and her unconventional life, haunting beauty and the secrecy of her

identity intrigued polite London society. Tissot was fascinated by Kathleen’s beauty and

painted her ceaselessly until her early death from Tuberculosis, aged 28 ,the year after this

painting was made. After Kathleen’s death Tissot underwent a religious crisis,

returning to France and painting almost exclusively biblical scenes.

Accepted in lieu of Inheritance tax from the Estate of Dr John Newton by HM Government in 2021 and allocated to the Ulster Museum, National Museums NI and purchased with the assistance of grants from the Department for Communities, National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund.