“Quite Astonishing Fidelity?”: Verisimilitude and Obstruction in Jacques Joseph Tissot’s Thames Pictures

Abstract

This analysis of Jacques Joseph (James) Tissot’s pictures of the Thames, painted and etched following his relocation to London in 1871, argues against the predominant scholarship that frames them as reflective of Tissot’s ambition to strive for identification with the interests and perspectives of English viewers. I find instead that the artworks are indices of the artist’s distance and disorientation, and that the pictures register his alienation from British imperial commerce through an indifference to summoning up its political and economic valences. While Tissot’s narratives, in which the English play the starring roles, tell vivid and engaging stories, the hyperrealistic depictions of nautical lines function otherwise. Tissot’s idiosyncratically dense and hectic rigging works to unmoor his boats from their surroundings in his pictures, thereby diminishing the stature and force of the machines and mechanisms of international shipping on the Thames, the unequivocal markers of British imperial dominion.