James Tissot, Still on Top (1873): The Painted Pleasure of a Society Looking Up

Zocine Art
Jun 29
7 min read

James Tissot painted the moment three women on a balcony tilt their parasols back to watch a sailor climb the rigging of a ship at anchor. The painting is called Still on Top. It is one of the strangest titles in nineteenth-century European art: it could refer to the sailor still aloft, or to the social position of the women looking up, or to the painter himself in 1873, suddenly the most fashionable society painter in London after fleeing the Paris Commune two years earlier. Tissot meant all three.

Born in Nantes in 1836, dead in a chateau in the Doubs in 1902, Tissot is the painter the Impressionists liked, the Pre-Raphaelites borrowed from, and the Victorians paid more than almost anyone. He painted contemporary fashion with the precision of a tailor and the social attention of a satirist. He painted what nobody else was painting: the present moment, in its actual dress, on its actual balcony, with its actual weather. This is what looking at a Tissot teaches.

What the Painting Shows

Three women stand at a balcony rail. The two on the left wear morning dresses of striped cream and pale rose. The third, on the right, wears a deep teal silk with a yellow trim. They are tilting their parasols backwards so that they can see upward, into the sky and the masts. A sailor in red trousers and a white shirt is climbing the rigging, his arm hooked around a rope. He is the still-on-top of the title: literally aloft, still up there, still in the air the women have lifted their faces to find.

But the painting is also a study in the small social mechanics of looking. Two of the women hold their parasols up; the third has lowered hers slightly. Two are looking up at the sailor; the third has glanced sideways at her companion. A small Pomeranian dog at their feet is the only figure in the painting looking straight at the viewer. Tissot painted the moment when collective attention is unevenly distributed, and made that small fissure the picture's emotional content.

The Painter Who Fled Paris and Found London

Tissot had been a successful Parisian painter for a decade by 1870. He exhibited at the Salon, he taught at his own studio, he made enough money to buy a town house on the Avenue de l'Imperatrice. Then the Franco-Prussian War broke out, Paris was besieged, and the Paris Commune took power in 1871. Tissot survived all of it, fought briefly in the Commune as a sharpshooter, and at the Commune's bloody collapse fled to London with very little.

He arrived in 1871 with a few canvases and the address of his friend the cartoonist Thomas Gibson Bowles. He was 35. Within two years he was the most expensive society painter in London, charging the equivalent of an annual professional salary for a single portrait. The London art market was hungry for exactly what he could do: paint contemporary fashion with French elegance, paint a Thames steamer with the same care as a Salon portrait, paint English society as if it were taking place in a Renoir afternoon.

The Year 1873 and the Painted Present

1873 was Tissot's annus mirabilis. He painted The Last Evening, with its red-cloaked woman against a twilight ship; Still on Top, with its tilted parasols; and the first canvases in the river-series that would occupy him for the next four years. The year is the moment when the painter who had been making historical reconstructions in Paris became the painter who would document, in real time, the manners and dress of mid-1870s English society.

He painted what people were wearing, that month, that season. He painted carriages of the actual model in use that year. He painted the Thames as it was: industrial, busy with commercial traffic, full of barges and small steamers. His painting is what an attentive nineteenth-century novel reads like: every detail correct, every social register notated, the texture of the historical present preserved.

Why the Impressionists Liked Him

Edgar Degas had known Tissot since their student days. When Degas was assembling the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, he wrote to Tissot in London begging him to send work. Tissot refused. He was making too much money in the London market to risk being attached to a Parisian movement still being mocked by critics. The decision was strategically perfect and art-historically catastrophic: by refusing the Impressionist association, Tissot saved his market but lost his place in the modernist canon for a hundred years.

What the Impressionists liked in his painting was the eye. Tissot painted what a flaneur sees when he walks along the Thames at three in the afternoon. He painted angles a camera would later make famous: the figure cropped at the elbow, the foreground that obscures the middle, the railing that cuts across the picture. He was solving the same compositional problems Degas was solving with ballerinas and Monet was solving with railway stations, but with painted parasols and silk waistcoats instead.

Kathleen Newton, the Painter's Late Companion

In 1875 or 1876, Tissot met Kathleen Newton, a young Irishwoman, divorced, with two children, six years younger than him. She moved into his St John's Wood house in north London and became his companion, his model, the subject of more than a hundred canvases over the next six years. She is the woman in the deep teal dress in Still on Top, painted before Tissot had met her in person but already, in some sense, the figure he was preparing to paint over and over.

Kathleen Newton died of tuberculosis in 1882 at the age of 28. Tissot stopped painting society pictures within a year, abandoned London for Paris, and devoted the rest of his life to a vast Bible illustration project, hundreds of watercolours of New Testament scenes that occupied him until his own death in 1902. The English society pictures, all of them, are essentially the work of nine years: 1873 to 1882. Still on Top is from the beginning of that arc.

Why the Painting Reads as Modern

Still on Top is a painting of three figures looking somewhere the painting does not show. The sailor at the top of the rigging is rendered small and almost incidental; the women's faces are turned up but slightly away from the viewer; the actual object of their attention is half-hidden by the parasol of the woman on the left. The painting is, in the end, a study of looking itself, not of what is being looked at.

That is a profoundly modern subject. Nineteenth-century history painting put its subject at the centre, lit it carefully, told you exactly what to look at. Tissot puts the subject offscreen and paints the act of attention. The viewer is invited to look at people looking. It is the same compositional gesture Manet made in The Bar at the Folies-Bergere a decade later, the same one Cassatt made with mothers watching their children. Tissot got there first, in a society painting that nobody at the time thought of as modern at all.

How to Hang a Tissot in a Modern Interior

Frame in slim oxidised brass or unstained ash; never gilt. The painting carries its own visual weight in the silk and the parasols, and a heavy gilt frame fights the painting for attention. The picture works best at a substantial size: 30x40 inches reads correctly; smaller reductions lose the fabric detail that is half the painting. Hang in a drawing room, a library, or a study, against a paint colour with some pigment in it (clay rose, sage, deep cream); against bright white walls the picture loses its summer-afternoon temperature.

Tissot pairs well with other late-Victorian society painters (John Singer Sargent in particular) but also, surprisingly, with the smaller late Impressionist canvases. He sits comfortably between two registers that the canon usually keeps apart: the salon society painting and the experimental modern picture. That tonal in-betweenness is what makes him useful in a contemporary interior.

Key Takeaways

James Tissot (1836-1902) painted Still on Top in 1873, his first year of full English success after fleeing the Paris Commune in 1871.
The painting shows three women on a balcony watching a sailor climb a ship's rigging; the actual subject is the act of looking, not what is being looked at.
Tissot refused to participate in the first Impressionist exhibition (1874) and was excluded from the modernist canon for a century as a result; he is now recognised as a quiet pioneer of the painted-present subject.
His nine-year English period (1873-1882) ended with the death of his companion Kathleen Newton from tuberculosis; he abandoned society painting and returned to Paris to make Bible watercolours.
Frame in slim oxidised brass or unstained ash; hang against pigmented walls (clay rose, sage, deep cream), not bright white.

Frequently Asked

Why is Still on Top called that?

The title carries at least three meanings simultaneously: the sailor is still aloft in the rigging; the women on the balcony belong to the social class still at the top; and Tissot himself in 1873 was, after a decade in Paris and two years in London, still on top of his career. The triple reading is characteristic of the painter's wit.

Why did Tissot refuse the first Impressionist exhibition?

Degas wrote to him in London in early 1874, asking for canvases. Tissot was at that moment earning more money than almost any other society painter in London. To send work to a Parisian exhibition still being mocked by critics would have endangered the London market. The commercial decision was correct; the art-historical decision excluded him from the modernist canon for a century.

Who is Kathleen Newton?

A divorced Irishwoman whom Tissot met in 1875 or 1876 and lived with for six years. She is the model for more than a hundred of his English-period canvases. She died of tuberculosis in 1882 at the age of 28; Tissot left England within a year and never painted society again.

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