The Convalescent (The Warrior's Daughter)

Provenance

Private Collection, Paris.

Description / Expertise

In 1876 Mrs Kathleen Newton, Tissot’s mistress, muse, model and great love of his life, came to live with him in London, together with her two children. Although it was an unusual arrangement by Victorian standards, it was for Tissot the happiest period of his life. For the first and only time in his life, he was living the life of a family man and this change in domestic life is also reflected in his art. After 1876 the emphasis began to shift away from society life to more intimate domestic scenes. The settings became familiar and repetitive – interiors of the house and studio at St John’s Wood, often with the children at play; scenes in the garden; up and down the Thames to Richmond, Greenwich, and beyond to Gravesend and Ramsgate. Over all of them presides the slim, elegant presence of Mrs Newton.



“Mrs Newton also appeared in many pictures on the themes of sickness and convalescence which now occurred with increasing frequency, and were made all the more poignant by her own advancing illness [consumption]. In ‘The Warrior’s Daughter’ previously known as ‘The Convalescent’, it is not Mrs Newton who is ill, but the old warrior in the bath chair, being wheeled around Regent’s Park. In the later pictures, such as ‘Summer Evening’ [1882 – the year of her death] Mrs Newton herself is the invalid, well wrapped in rugs and propped up with cushions, sitting in a wicker chair in the garden or the conservatory.”

Christopher Wood, Tissot, p. 92.





Tissot painted another version, of the same size, of The Convalescent (The Warrior’s Daughter) which is in the Manchester City Art Gallery. See colour illustration in Christopher Wood Tissot, page 94, colour pl. 91 [note: date should read c.1878].