The Crack Shot
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (Nantes 1836 - Château de Buillon, Besancon 1902)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
1869 (signed and dated)
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
673 x 464 mm
Place of origin
England
Order this imageCollection
Wimpole, Cambridgeshire
NT 207841
Caption
An elegant and fashionably dressed young woman, aiming a gun, stands in a walled garden before a table loaded with pistols and rifles. The title of this painting, The Crack Shot, reveals everything the viewer needs to know, but the subject of a markswoman would have been unexpected and potentially alluring. The French artist James Tissot (1836–1902) developed a highly successful career in London, and this portrait is one of his greatest achievements. It dates from 1869, when Tissot was on his second visit to the capital. He settled in England shortly afterwards, becoming part of a society circle that included Edward, Prince of Wales (1841–1910). The identity of the poised and determined woman in this painting is unknown, but the bearded man seated behind her may be the artist’s friend Thomas Gibson Bowles (1842– 1922), founder of the then satirical journal Vanity Fair. Tissot mainly painted images of glamorous society men and women, and he was particularly attentive to the fall of fabric and decorative trimmings of dress, perhaps because his family were involved in the linen and millinery trade.
Summary
Oil painting on canvas, The Crack Shot, by James Tissot (Nantes 1836 - Château de Buillon, Besançon 1902), signed bottom left: J.J. Tissot 69. A young woman practicing her shot stands within the pergola of a walled garden in the autumn, intently taking aim with a pistol. She is dressed in a sumptuous fur-trimmed grey paisley shawl-jacket (ruched ‘a la polonaise’ to prevent it dragging), a black taffeta dress, and a matching hat worn high on the crown and tilted over the forehead to reveal a coiffure of pinned-up curls. Before her is a small dropleaf table, painted the same green as the gazebo. Atop the table are two handguns and leaning against it two upturned rifles. Seated on a bench behind the young woman is a bearded man and a woman dressed in black, covering her ears with her hands to muffle the sound of gunfire. The picture possibly shows the garden of Cleeve Lodge, the Hyde Park home of Thomas Gibson Bowles (1841-1922), editor of Vanity Fair. Bowles had invited Tissot over to England to paint the magazine's chief backer, Colonel Burnaby (1869-1870; National Portrait Gallery 2642). The bearded figure in the background may be a portrait of Bowles.
Full description
1869 was the first year of Tissot's second visit to London, a visit that seems to have been intended as more than just a sojourn, rather – having conquered Paris socially and with his art – as a fresh campaign in life's battle. It was, in the event, only to be a precursor of his actually taking up residence here, from 1871 to 1882, since – making the picture a curious anticipation of events – he was to return to Paris in the autumn of 1870 to play a courageous part as a sniper during the Prussian siege of the city. Other productions of the year 1869-70 show a similar desire to give a new direction to his art in England. From 1870 dates his memorable portrait of the nonchalant hero, Colonel Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (National Portrait Gallery, NPG 2642), the first and most striking of a handful of portraits of men, that are restricted to his first years in London. Between 1869 and 1870, under the alias 'Coïdé', he supplied sixteen caricatures of foreign royalty and politicians to the newly founded journal Vanity Fair, whose great initial popularity was due to its pioneering this art-form in England, in the shape of chromolithographs of English politicians and other public figures by 'Ape' (Carlo Pellegrini). The linking figure between all these early activities of Tissot in England – perhaps even including the present picture – was that lively character Thomas Gibson Bowles (?1841-1922). It was he who founded Vanity Fair in 1868, commissioning – or buying en bloc – Tissot's caricatures the next year. It has been suggested that the present painting is set in the garden of Bowles’ London home, Cleeve Lodge. However, there is no evidence for this, nor even of Tissot staying with Bowles on his first visit to London: he is more likely to have stayed with a fellow-artist, to give him access to a studio. But it certainly looks like the garden of a town house, with walls and piers dating from around 1700. The key to the locale - and perhaps even to the subject - may instead reside with Adriano de Murrieta, Marquis de Santurce, who attempted without success to sell this and another picture by Tissot, On the Thames: the frightened heron, at Christie's in 1883. Adriano, his brother José, and their father Don Cristobel held vast collections chiefly of modern British and Continental painting, which they displayed at their London residences 11, Kensington Palace Gardens, and 4, Carlton House Terrace, and their country estate, Southover (later Wadhurst Park). The present picture, then, may not only have been painted for one of the Murrietas – rather than simply bought by them – but may also have employed some of the surroundings of Kensington Palace as its setting. Nonetheless the identity and pretext of Tissot’s markswoman remain a mystery. (adapted from Alastair Laing, In Trust for the Nation, exh. cat., 1995)
Provenance
Sold by Tissot to Pilgeram in 1873, under the title Le Pistolet, for £280 (7000 Francs); offered at the sale of Adriano de Murrieta, Marquès de Santurce (of 11 Kensington Palace Gardens), Christie's, London, 7 April 1883, lot 151, under the title 'A Crack Shot', for £220.10s (failed to find a buyer); sold Joseph Beausire sale, Christie's, London, 13 April 1934, lot 76, under the title 'The Rifle Range'; bought by Arthur Tooth for £52.10s; with the Leicester Galleries, London, 1936 to 1937; bought by Captain George Bambridge (1892-1943) and thence to his widow, Elsie Kipling, Mrs Bambridge, by whom left to the National Trust with Wimpole and all its contents on her death in 1976.
Credit line
Wimpole Hall, The Bambridge Collection (National Trust)
Marks and inscriptions
(J.J.) Tissot (69)
Makers and roles
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (Nantes 1836 - Château de Buillon, Besancon 1902), artist
Exhibition history
James Tissot, 1836-1902, Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 2019 - 2020 James Tissot, 1836-1902, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 2019 - 2020 In Trust for the Nation, National Gallery, London, 1995 - 1996, no.28
References
Laver 1936: J. Laver, Vulgar Society, the Romantic Career of Tissot, London 1936, p.73, 75, pl.V (dated to c.1872). Wentworth 1984: Michael Wentworth, James Tissot, Oxford 1984, p.111, pl. 96. Marshall and Warner 1999: Nancy Rose Marshall and Malcolm Warner, James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love, New Haven and London 1999 Corbeau-Parsons 2018: Caroline Corbeau-Parsons (ed.), Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, exh.cat. Tate Britain, London 2018 Buron 2019: Melissa E. Buron, James Tissot, San Francisco: de Young, Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2019., p. 99, 255, 286; cat.no. 16. James Tissot, l'ambigu modern, exh.cat. Musée d'Orsay, Paris 2020, pp. 92-3, cat. no. 49 (reproduced), 309.
