Tissot’s painting was inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragic play based on the Faust legend, published in 1808. Goethe presented Faust as a scholar and introduced the character of Marguerite into the story. Here, we see Marguerite battling with her conscience after Faust has seduced her. She contemplates her fate in the corner of a candlelit church; on the wall behind her is a painting of The Last Judgement. The children kneeling in prayer before the shrine accentuate the young woman’s moral corruption and spiritual isolation. In 1871 Tissot moved from Paris to London due to the Franco-Prussian War. In England he established a reputation as a painter of genre scenes depicting fashionable society. This painting, with its medieval setting and literary subject matter, reflects the influence of the Belgian history painter Henri Leys upon Tissot’s early work.
March 2016
James Tissot 1836-1902, Barbican Art Gallery, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, 1985
James Tissot, Victorian Life/Modern Love, Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, 22 September - 28 November 1999; Musée de Québec, Canada, 15 December 1999 - 12 March 2000; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 24 March - 2 July 2000
James Tissot 1836-1902, Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 12 October 2019 - 9 February 2020