James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot (1836–1902)

Edgar Degas

ca. 1867–68 · Oil on canvas · European Paintings

The fashionable painter James Tissot was Degas’s friend and mentor in the 1860s and early 1870s. Posed in a studio, top hat and satin-lined cape by his side, Tissot is surrounded by canvases that reflect the wide-ranging tastes he shared with Degas: an exotic, Japanese-style picture; scenes of contemporary leisure; and behind the easel, a sixteenth-or-seventeenth-century Venetian subject. At center, a copy after a portrait of Frederick the Wise in the Louvre, formerly attributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder, pays homage to Northern Renaissance art.

Artist

Edgar Degas

Date

ca. 1867–68

Medium

Oil on canvas

Department

European Paintings

Credit line

Rogers Fund, 1939