Portrait du docteur Auguste Tissot

The portrait of Dr Auguste Tissot from 1783, now in the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, depicts the Swiss physician and medical writer whose books on nervous diseases, the health of scholars, and the ill-effects of masturbation made him the most widely read medical author in 18th-century Europe. Kauffmann's Swiss origins provided natural connections to the Swiss intellectual and medical community, and Tissot was one of the luminaries of that world. His 1761 work on the health of scholars was widely read by the intellectuals and artists of Kauffmann's own circle, and his theories about the effects of intellectual overwork on physical health were directly relevant to the professional lives of artists like herself. The Lausanne museum's holding of the portrait connects it to the Swiss cultural context in which both painter and sitter were embedded. Kauffmann's treatment of the physician combines her characteristic refinement — warm color, dignified pose, careful rendering of the sitter's intellectual presence — with the particular warmth she brought to portraits of people whose work she respected and whose ideas she understood. The portrait is among her most personally invested male likenesses.

The portrait captures the physician's intellectual character with Kauffmann's characteristic refinement, using warm color and dignified pose to convey professional authority.