James Tissot’s Journey to the Jewish Museum
Discover how James Tissot’s beloved watercolor illustrations entered the Jewish Museum collection. The artist’s original suite of 368 illustrations of the Hebrew Bible have been digitized for the first time and are available online.
James Tissot’s watercolor illustrations are some of the most beloved and sought-after images in the Jewish Museum’s collection. The biblical stories are illustrated in cinematic vignettes that have influenced popular culture for decades. Though Tissot was mostly known as a painter of the fashionable society of London and Paris, he began a series of religious paintings, The Life of Christ, in 1885. Completed in 1894, the almost four hundred paintings toured Paris, London, and the United States until, by public subscription and with great fanfare, the Brooklyn Museum purchased them in 1900.
After the wild acclaim of his illustrations of the Christian Bible, Tissot began a project to illustrate the Hebrew Bible. He made one of many trips to Palestine in 1896 to draw inspiration, observing the landscape where the biblical stories took place and producing what he felt were historically accurate illustrations.
In 1902, when he was midway through the project, Tissot died suddenly. The series was continued by artists from Tissot’s studio, who finished his partially completed pictures or created works that approximated his style.
There is a complicated and fascinating story of how these illustrations ended up in the Jewish Museum’s collection, quite different from the fervor surrounding the Brooklyn Museum’s purchase of the Life of Christ series. After the artist’s death, the American Tissot Society owned the later series which, due to the society’s financial difficulties, had to be put up for auction in 1909. The minimum price of $40,000 set by the gallery was not met, so the works were sold to Jacob H. Schiff, a private collector, who then gave them to the New York Public Library.
In 1911, the gouaches were exhibited at the main building and other branches of the library, after which they were put into storage. They languished in the basement at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street until 1952, at which point the Schiff heirs were asked to find a more suitable repository for the artworks. They chose the Jewish Museum, located since 1947 in the former home of their relative, Frieda Schiff Warburg. The paintings received little attention and were left crated in a remote storeroom until 1976.
The good condition of the works, all but forgotten in storage, is a small miracle. Protected by their sturdy crates, the small watercolors, each no larger than a sheet of paper, survived in their period gilt and wood frames and with their original golden mats.
The Christian Bible, illustrated by Tissot and published by M. de Brunhoff, Paris, has been widely reproduced since it was first printed in 1904. Tissot’s illustrations of the Hebrew Bible gained new attention in 1982 when the Jewish Museum exhibited around 160 of the watercolors. It is no coincidence that Tissot’s ark was used as a model for the set of Stephen Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was released around the same time.
The original suite of 368 illustrations of the Hebrew Bible has been digitized for the first time and are available online for high-resolution download on the Jewish Museum’s website.
— Katherine Danalakis, Assistant Director, Collections , Jewish Museum
Search our online collection to view illustrations by James Jacques Joseph Tissot by visiting TheJewishMuseum.org/Collection.
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