1 QUIET BY JACQUES JOSEPH ‘JAMES’ TISSOT
‘The Ulster Museum in Belfast recently acquired this beautiful painting – Quiet. We had a client who was the heir of a man called Doctor Newton. Doctor Newton had been fascinated by the story of his ancestor's first wife and had bought a painting of her in the 1960s by Jacques Joseph ‘James’ Tissot, a French mid 19th-century artist. It shows a young woman in a garden with a littleher new husband, who promptly threw her out. She was pregnant and as a divorced Roman Catholic woman she lived a life of seclusion in London. Tissot met her and was immediately smitten. She moved in with him in St John's Wood and he used her as his muse for many paintings. They lived together happily until she died of TB at the age of 28 – a real Victorian melodrama. He was bereft and tried to contact her via seances and so on. This painting is of Kathleen, her niece and their dog in the garden. Nobody knew who she was until the niece as a very old lady in the 1940s revealed it was her aunt who was Tissot's mystery muse.’
