Footnotes

Provenance
Perhaps sold by Tissot in autumn/winter 1869 as La tête à tête to Paris art dealer Adolphe Goupil for 2,300 francs, Goupil recording purchase as La Conversation and selling the painting to New York art dealer Michael Knoedler; or perhaps as Le Cabaret ('The Tavern') to Paris art dealer Frederic Reitlinger for 2,600 francs (both Goupil and Reitlinger purchases recorded in Tissot's sales notebook but may be different, currently untraced paintings).
Ronald Lewis by 1984, having been in his family 'for at least 50 years'.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, New York, 23 May 1989, lot 108.
Private collection, USA.

Exhibited
Probably Vienna, Kunstlerhaus (Austrian Artists' Society), First Great International Art Exhibition, April-May 1869, no. 286 as From the Life of a Libertine, Married ('Aus dem Leben eines Wustlings, Im Hafen'), price 2,000 francs.
London, Barbican Art Gallery, James Tissot, November 1984 - January 1985 (travelling to Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, February - March 1985), no. 26.
Paris, Musée du Petit Palais, James Tissot, April - June 1985, no. 23.
Tokyo, Isetan Museum of Art, James Tissot, no. 15 (and travelling to Daimaru Museum, Osaka; Prefectural Art Museum, Mie; Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Tochigi; and Takashimaya Gallery, Yokohama)

Literature
Willard E. Misfeldt, James Jacques Joseph Tissot: A Bio-Critical Study, Washington University, 1971, p. 99.
Willard E. Misfeldt, The Albums of James Tissot, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1982, illustrated p. 42 as plate I-72.
Michael Wentworth, James Tissot, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 73-4.
Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, ed., James Tissot, Phaidon Press, Oxford, 1984, p. 103, no. 26.
Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, ed., James Tissot, Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, 1985, pp. 151-2, no. 23 and colour plate IX.
Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, in Chugi Ikegami, ed., James Tissot James Tissot Catalogue Committee, Japan, 1988, pp. 132-3, no. 15 and colour plate p. 55.
Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, 'Tissot's Sales Notebook (Carnet de Ventes),' in Melissa E. Buron, ed., James Tissot, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/Delmonico Books–Prestel, 2019, pp. 273 and 336.


In photograph albums of James Tissot's works compiled by the artist from the late 1850s to 1890s, this painting features among oils exhibited or sold by him in 1869. It is one of a number of paintings completed by Tissot between 1868 and 1871 that were inspired by French late-18th-century art and literature. These include Un déjeuner ('A Luncheon'), sold in these rooms on 20 March 2024, see fig. 1.

Born in the port city of Nantes, north-west France, Tissot was christened Jacques Joseph but known as James from a young age and used that name professionally as an artist from his first acceptance at the Paris Salon in 1859. Alongside modern-dress portraits, Tissot initially painted compositions inspired by Northern Renaissance works, his best-known pictures focusing on Marguerite, the heroine of Goethe's Faust. From 1864 he exhibited modern-life paintings at the Salon but continued to show historical-dress pictures there and elsewhere. In 1868 he exhibited at the Salon Un Déjeuner, innovatively based on 1780s-90s artworks that were having an influence on contemporary fashionable wear, though not yet on fine art. It is probable that the painting now known as A Tryst at a Riverside Café is the one Tissot sent to Vienna in spring 1869 for the First Great International Art Exhibition of the Austrian Artists' Society with the title From the Life of a Libertine, Married ('Aus dem Leben eines Wustlings, Im Hafen'). A pendant, From the Life of a Libertine, The Rendezvous ('Aus dem Leben eines Wustlings, Das Randezvous'), is likely the painting now known as Unaccepted (sold Christie's, London, 30 November 1984, lot 98), featuring the same young woman as in the present lot, with a slightly older man in the same coat and hat. Both paintings may have been sold by Tissot with different titles in late 1869 (exhibition titles often being geared towards specific audiences).

Libertines or rakes – men of loose sexual morals – were the subject of much risqué (even pornographic) 18th-century literature and art, along with courtesans, prostitutes and other sexually-active women, who were often depicted as French. Such art and literature was popular in the 19th century when erotic modern subjects were frowned upon and censored. By setting an encounter between a young woman and a man in the 18th century, Tissot was able to allude subtly to well-known risqué themes without making them overt. Viewers presented with a painted episode from 'the life of a Libertine' would immediately read the male depicted as a rake and sexual predator, likely endangering the virtue of any women in the vicinity, although women might also be sexually adventurous. In the present lot, the young woman in the foreground has prominent rings on the third finger of her left hand, signifying betrothal, and the viewer's eye is drawn to the rings through the composition's diagonals. If the painting's subtitle is 'Married', it is she who is clearly a spouse. The young man might be her husband but if a 'Libertine' is likely not. He appears to be whispering to her as she turns her head slightly to listen. Her eyelids have a reddish tinge, suggesting that she may have been crying and that her marriage is not altogether blissful. The servant girl setting out plates, on a table with newly-laid tablecloth, is looking into the distance, directing her gaze diplomatically away from the couple. Her resigned expression conveys the impression that she has seen it all before. Table-laying and cloth hint at likely future bedding of the couple.

Tissot was drawing on late-18th-century imagery of love scenes as painted by Moreau le Jeune, Louis-Léopold Boilly and Philibert-Louis Debucourt, with print reproductions of their works widely circulated and collected in 1860s Paris. Picturing the couple in a bower, on a bench and with a small dog, echoes the last of Daniel Chodowiecki's 1787 etched illustrations to Frances [Fanny] Burney's novel Cecilia (1782), widely circulated in French and German translation until the late-19th century, with Chodowiecki's illustrations republished in 1789 almanacs and very well-known. There was a revival of interest in 18th-century fine and decorative art during the 1860s, although influence and imitation in 1860s paintings and fashion derived more from pre-Revolutionary ancien regime examples than the Revolutionary period that attracted Tissot. He collected 18th-century china, silver-ware, glass, furniture and fashion accessories, often featuring them in his paintings, and probably had items of clothing made to his specifications as well as bought from second-hand clothes sellers. The red, double-caped greatcoat and black tricorne in A Tryst at a Riverside Café were most likely theatre props borrowed by Tissot, and appear in his small paintings of actors as well as other works made around 1868/69, including Un Déjeuner. Its grey satin lining is revealed at collar and bench in a tour-de-force of costume painting.

The young man is an incroyable or 1790s punk, with huge brass coat-buttons and chin-high white cravat. His female companion lacks the puffed-up 'pouter pigeon' kerchief and powdered, fluffed-out hair of a true merveilleuse (1790s punk) but her white-on-white striped gown has masculine-style, wide collar revers that were the height of Revolutionary fashion in 1790, and are seen here protruding from beneath her period black gauze fichu, whose ends are tied around her waist. Her broad-brimmed black hat, with grey-and-white-striped silk ribbons, reflects 1780s millinery and was one of Tissot's favourite props. It appears in Un Déjeuner (though without ribbons tied below the chin), as well as Unaccepted (the probably 'Libertine . . . Rendezvous'), Jeune femme en bateau (1870, Private collection), Partie carrée (1870, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), Jeune femme à l'éventail (c.1870, Private collection), La cheminée (circa 1870, Private collection) and On the River (1871, Government Art Collection). The latter also features the same white-on-white striped dress as the present lot, with long fitted sleeves, pleated cuffs and wide hem-flounce of the same fabric. A pencil study for the costumed young woman in Unaccepted (British Museum, formerly collection of Vincent Price) would have been one of several made at a single sitting with slightly variant poses for use in different paintings. Another drawing, of the seated man in tricorne and caped greatcoat (present whereabouts unknown), served for both Unaccepted and A Tryst at a Riverside Café, with Tissot introducing minor variations to face, hair and costume detail as he painted.

While giving the appearance from a distance of minutely-painted detail, Tissot's brushwork is looser and more impressionistic when viewed close to, especially in the riverside background. Algae-rich backwaters are captured in dark-green paint thinly brushed over Tissot's favourite pinkish canvas ground. Distant buildings are rapidly sketched in, with flecks of white ripple on the sluggish waters, perhaps from light rain. Tissot was familiar with the changing appearance of rivers like the Loire, flowing through Paris to its estuary in Nantes, and would become famous for Thames-side paintings when he lived in London. The sky in the present work is overcast, lacking the strong sunlight that would make the trellised terrace a place of welcome shade. Cool tones give the painting a melancholy air, punctured by the bright red greatcoat but underlined by the pug dog's sad-looking face. The melancholy may reflect Tissot's views regarding marital infidelity and the inevitability of pain in human relationships, topics he often alluded to in his works. Solace found in faithful dogs was a favourite theme, running through both Tissot's modern-dress and historical-costume pictures. He likely owned the pug, which features in numerous Tissot paintings including most of those listed above. He was so good at painting dogs that he was even commissioned in 1869 to paint the portrait of one belonging to a Russian woman.

Both of Tissot's 'Libertine' pictures at the 1869 Vienna exhibition were priced at 2,000 francs each but whether they sold from the exhibition is unknown; both could be identified with pictures sold by the artist under different titles in autumn/winter 1869. Other Tissot paintings in that Vienna exhibition were: the Northern Renaissance-inspired and costumed Dance of Death (1860, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design) priced 3,000 francs and sold in 1870 for 2,000 francs to art dealer Frederic Reitlinger; The Abduction, priced 7,000 francs and with figures in 'troubadour' historical dress (probably the painting now in Musée d'Arts de Nantes); and a replica modern-dress Widow, priced 5,000 francs (present whereabouts unknown).

We are grateful to Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz for compiling this catalogue entry.