Some images haunt my memory with a savage intensity that will not let go. The desolation of the moonscape across parts of Vietnam after Nixon’s B-52s had been by. An old woman sitting in a Belfast gutter, her back to a lamppost, her body slowly swelling, moments after an IRA bomb warning had gone wrong. My mother’s hands where the deep cracks in her skin were stained black after peeling potatoes and apples for hours . . .
Since I first saw it, this tiny watercolour has hung in my thoughts without a break. James Tissot was a society artist. He had real and striking talent, though most of his subjects alienate me. But you have to watch out for the incidental details in all of his paintings. They tell you something about him as a human being as well as an artist. He observed life and let it into his paintings: the children peeping into a half empty ballroom; the life in the street that carries on as a circle of self-satisfied young men pose one by one for a group portrait of the upwardly mobile; the ordinary sailors in the distant background of a society ball on their ship.
If you had the chance to visit the exhibition on Impressionists in London, either at the Tate Britain in London or the Petit Palais in Paris in 2018, or if you get to the current James Tissot: l’Ambigu moderne at the Musée d’Orsay, you may agree with me.
