James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot (1836-1902)

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.