The name James Tissot evokes depictions of fashionably dressed women and debonair men, images that seem to celebrate materiality over spirituality, yet Tissot’s most personally meaningful work was as a visionary religious artist.

Raised and educated in the Roman Catholic tradition, Tissot expressed a renewed interest in the religion as well as in Spiritualism following the death of his companion and muse, Kathleen Newton, in 1882. Spiritualism and its French counterpart, Spiritism, were complex socio-religious belief systems popular in the late nineteenth century that attempted to scientifically prove the existence of the afterlife. Spiritualism looked beyond Judeo-Christian concepts of the hereafter by conducting rituals such as séances and presenting “evidence” of direct communication between the living and the dead, such as table rapping and slate writing.

Newton died in London on November 9, 1882. It is not clear how long Newton had suffered from tuberculosis—also called consumption because it seemed to consume the invalid’s body—but witnessing her decline surely distressed Tissot. Newton’s niece, Lilian Hervey recalled that afterward, a bereaved Tissot “draped her coffin in purple velvet and prayed beside it for hours.” After Newton’s funeral, Tissot abandoned the London home they shared together, returned to Paris, and began attending Spiritualist séances in an attempt to make contact with her. According to the artist Louise Jopling, it was Newton’s death that stimulated Tissot’s Spiritualist interests:

On May 20, 1885, Tissot attended a private séance in London, facilitated by the British medium William Eglinton. At this séance, Eglinton purportedly materialized the deceased Newton along with the medium’s spirit guide. According to Eglinton:

The panel that Goncourt describes may be a recently rediscovered cloisonné enamel made by Tissot that conflates Egyptian, Christian, and Chinese symbolism relating to the afterlife, demonstrating Tissot’s knowledge of international and historical spiritual iconography. Each of the panel’s corners features the symbol of one of the four Christian Evangelists. The standing winged protectors of the dead are the Egyptian goddesses Nephthys and Isis, sisters of Osiris; the central figure is their mother, Nut, goddess of the sky, who often appeared on Egyptian coffins. Tissot rendered the disk above Nut’s head as the ancient Chinese yin and yang symbol, enhanced with his own monogram, “JTJ.” This combination of diverse symbols reflects the late nineteenth-century European interest in alternative spiritualities, which borrowed concepts as well as iconography from a variety of belief systems.

Volumes documenting the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research found after Tissot’s death at his estate, the Château de Buillon, confirm his sustained curiosity about Spiritualism and the occult. A newspaper report covering the 1964 sale of Tissot’s possessions described a collection of five thousand books, including publications demonstrating that Tissot: