James Jacques Joseph Tissot - A Winter's Walk

A WINTER'S WALK (PROMENADE DANS LA NEIGE)
signed u.r.: J J Tissot
oil on panel
79 by 37cm.; 31 by 14½in.
ESTIMATE 800,000 - 1,200,000 GBP

Probably Manchester Royal Institution, 1878, no.231 as Wintertime

'... he began a liaison with a woman whose identity was to remain shrouded in mystery for over half a century - so
much so that she was long referred to as la mystérieuse.'
RUSSELL ASH, JAMES TISSOT, 1992

A Winter's Walk shows the beautiful Kathleen Newton, who was Tissot's adored partner and most frequent model from about 1877 through to the time of her death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight in 1882. Born Kathleen Kelly at Agra in India, she was the daughter of a civil servant employed by the British East India Company. She was educated at a convent in England, and at the age of sixteen was married to Isaac Newton, a surgeon in the Indian Army. She was, however, in love with a Captain Palliser of the Royal Navy, whom she had met on the outward voyage to India. After she ran away from her husband and became pregnant, he began divorce
proceedings. The child, Muriel Violet Mary, was born back in England on 20 December 1871, ten days before her divorce from Newton. Nothing is known about Kathleen until March 1876 when a second child, Cecil George, was born in London. It has been suggested that Tissot may have been the father but his first certain portrayal of
Kathleen was in autumn 1876. Soon afterwards she came to live with Tissot at his house, 17 Grove End Road, where she was to die on 9 November 1882. Her two children lived with their cousins and aunt at her sister Mary Pauline Hervey's house in nearby Hill Road and came on regular visits. As Catholics they were unable to marry,
since the Church does not recognise divorce, but lived as man and wife. Such an arrangement was frowned upon in some quarters and their circle of friends and social life became limited to those who did not disapprove of cohabitation, such as James McNeill Whistler, who lived similarly with Maud Franklin. Tissot devoted himself to her and she became central to his life and work. In the late 1870s and early 1880s Tissot sought to capture Kathleen Newton's haunting but fragile beauty in a series of intimate paintings, quite different to the large-scale social subjects that he painted when he first settled in London, and these become especially poignant as her illness progresses.

The composition of A Winter's Walk is based on Wenceslaus Hollar's etching Winter, from his half-length Seasons.

It was probably Hollar's image that inspired also Edouard Manet's Portrait of Berthe Morisot au manchon of 1868-69 (Cleveland Museum of Art) and Sir Francis Grant's portrait of Margaret Stuart Wortley of 1876 (private collection), both of which are similar to Tissot's picture. When he took up etching in 1875, Tissot turned to Frances Seymour Haden for advice, but also to view the historical etchings in Haden's collection, which included many examples by Hollar. The seventeenth century artist's series of Seasons in full length, three-quarters and half-length inspired
Tissot to create similar etchings and paintings.

A Winter's Walk was painted about 1878 and is probably the picture exhibited at the Manchester Royal Institution that autumn. A full-length Spring had been shown by Tissot at the Grosvenor Gallery in May 1878 and October at McLean's Gallery. While creating paintings Tissot was also working on etchings, which took longer to produce. The etching and drypoint of A Winter's Walk is dated 1880. The second and third states have been given a lettered title from Keats, 'She will bring in spite of frost / Beauties that the earth has lost', emulating the couplets Hollar included
below his personifications of the seasons. Symbolical evocations of a time of year had been a subject for artists since Classical times and remained popular among both French and English artists in the 1870s. Tissot had created full length personifications of seasons or months including Spring (Specimen of a Portrait) (Christie's, London, 27 November 2003, lot 21), which features Kathleen in a white dress against sunlit greenery, and October (Sotheby's, New York, 16 February 1995, lot 144), where Kathleen in black is offset by autumnal chestnut leaves. The present
painting is one of a set of half-lengths that include Summer (Christie's, London, 7 June 2007, lot 38). In his Winter Walk Tissot celebrates Kathleen's radiant beauty, but also introduces a wistful mood as if intimating the imminent deterioration of her health.

The direct, confident and inviting gaze, which Tissot was fond of using in his paintings, shows Kathleen's large emerald-green eyes to best effect as she engages the viewer with a slight smile across her red lips. Swathed in a fur wrap and with her hands immersed in a muff, just like Hollar's Winter, she is a woman of fashion. The white of the snow emphasises her porcelain pale skin while the scarlet lining of her black bonnet enhances the redness of her lips and the delicate pink of her cheeks, flushed by the chill air. In his etched version Tissot used red ink for the
text below the image.

We are very grateful to Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz for her kind assistance in the cataloguing of this picture which will be included in her forthcoming book James Tissot, due to be published in 2011.