The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth)

Those who read DailyArt regularly know that I'm a bit obsessed with Tissot recently, but I really think he painted in a way which we really need now. Look at this painting—it is so light and joyful! So summer-ish!

James Tissot often painted a man with two women in order to explore the subtle nuances of flirtation and attraction through body language and facial expression. Tissot's work depicts two women with a young man in a flirtatious situation, but with a dangerous sensual undercurrent of moral uncertainty. The man is dressed plainly in the uniform of a junior naval officer. Each woman is wearing a fashionable gauzy white dress decorated with bows and ribbons, with a tightly fitting bodice over a corset and full skirts below the hips. Tissot focuses here on the boundaries of Victorian propriety and social convention, and their transgression. The languid pose of the nearest woman, and Tissot’s frank concentration on her fashionable hour-glass figure, inevitably led to the picture being criticized when it was first exhibited. The author Henry James dismissed it as "hard, vulgar and banal."

It is so funny how vulgarity and banality changed in the last 150 years.  ; )

- Zuzanna

P.S. Vulgarity was a real problem for another painter of this time, Gustave Courbet. Read here about his scandalous nudes!