James Tissot, the ambiguous figure of modernity

A delightful painter of fashion and appearances, and a beloved high-society portraitist, James Tissot (1836-1902) was long ignored by serious art historians. This film reveals a far more complex and interesting artist, a provincial in Paris, a bourgeois in the Paris Commune, and a Frenchman in London, for whom superficiality was a way to reveal hidden truths about society and its codes.