An interesting story

An Interesting Story of 1872, at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, depicts a social interior scene in which one or more figures reads or listens to a story — a subject that gave Tissot scope to explore the social and emotional textures of bourgeois life. The National Gallery of Victoria holds the oldest public art collection in Australia, and its acquisition of a work by Tissot from his London period reflects the broad cultural ambitions of the colonial institution. By 1872 Tissot was firmly established in London as the leading painter of fashionable social life, and works like this were collected across the English-speaking world as examples of Continental elegance and modern social observation. The reading or storytelling scene was a common genre that allowed the painter to depict both the reader and the listener, exploring attention, absorption, and the relationship between narrative and response.

Oil on canvas, the painting uses the enclosed interior setting that Tissot favoured for scenes of intimate social interaction. The figures are arranged to suggest conversation and the shared experience of narrative, with attention to how people orient themselves toward a speaker or text. His characteristic attention to dress and furnishing textures is fully operative.