The Apparition

The Apparition records an experience James Tissot believed he had at a spiritualist séance in London in May 1885. The French painter, celebrated for his elegant pictures of fashionable women, had lost his companion and muse Kathleen Newton in November 1882, and he turned to spiritualism in his grief. He made the image both as a painting and as a mezzotint print titled Apparition médiumnique. We have not been able to confirm the current location of the painting shown here.

What you are looking at

Two figures emerge from total darkness. On the left stands a bearded man with a heavy, solemn face, wrapped in white drapery that covers his head. On the right, slightly lower and closer, is a young woman, also veiled in white, her face pale and lifted, her eyes wide.

Both hold out their hands, and each palm holds a small glowing light. The light is the only source of illumination in the picture: it shines up into their faces, through their fingers and across the folds of their garments, which seem to dissolve into luminous mist at the edges. Beyond the reach of the light, the background is a deep brown-black. The surface of the canvas is covered with fine craquelure, visible across the dark areas.

The séance

Kathleen Newton, a young Irish divorcée, lived with Tissot in his house in St John's Wood from the late 1870s until her death from tuberculosis in 1882, aged 28. Tissot left London for Paris soon after. On 20 May 1885, back in London, he attended a séance with the well-known medium William Eglinton. According to accounts of the sitting, two figures appeared in the dark room, carrying lights: Kathleen and a spirit guide whom Eglinton called Ernest. Tissot said Kathleen kissed him.

Tissot painted the scene soon afterward, and the mezzotint followed later the same year. Contemporary skeptics regarded Eglinton as a fraud, and his "materializations" were widely suspected to be staged, but Tissot seems to have accepted the experience as real.

Meaning

The painting is a record of grief and belief rather than an allegory. Its style is unlike Tissot's bright society pictures: it uses a single hidden light source, a device familiar from the candlelit scenes of Georges de La Tour, to make the figures appear out of the void. Within a year Tissot had a religious conversion experience in Paris and devoted the rest of his life to illustrating the Bible.

Where to see it

Impressions of the mezzotint are held in several museum print rooms. For other images of love and loss in our catalogue, see Finis (The End of All Things), Premier Deuil and our Death in Art collection, and the James Tissot page.