In 1875, French painter and printmaker James Jacques-Joseph Tissot met divorcee Kathleen Newton, and fell for her head-over-brushes.
They had a scant seven years together before he was devastated by her death from tuberculosis in 1882.
During that time, which Tissot described as the happiest in his life, he painted and drew Newton and her children numerous times.
There is a good selection of Tissot’s paintings, arranged chronologically, on Wikipaintings. Those in which Newton appears begin around the middle of page 2.
For more, see my previous Lines and Colors posts on James Jacques-Joseph Tissot, linked below.
[Addendum: Those who appreciate Tissot’s work — and I think he is a very good painter who is often unjustly overlooked and underrated — will enjoy Lucy Paquette’s blog, which is devoted to her historical novel about the painter: The Hammock.
There is also a historical dramatization of Kathleen Newton’s encounter with Tissot: A Type of Beauty: the story of Kathleen Newton, by Patricia O’Reilly.]
