The Widower

The Widower of 1876, in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is one of Tissot's most psychologically complex paintings, depicting a man alone with his children in the aftermath of his wife's death. The subject engages with Victorian anxieties about the disrupted family, masculine grief, and the particular vulnerability of children who have lost their mother. Tissot himself would experience devastating grief when his companion Kathleen Newton died of tuberculosis in 1882, and this 1876 painting may already reflect a sensitivity to loss and its effects on domestic life. The Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired this important work for its Victorian collection, which it assembled systematically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The subject also allows Tissot to deploy his skills in depicting the textures of domestic life — children's clothes, garden settings, the ordinary objects of family living.

Oil on canvas, the painting uses a domestic garden setting typical of Tissot's St John's Wood period. The interplay of light and shade in an outdoor garden scene is handled with confidence. The figure of the widower and his children would be arranged to suggest both physical closeness and emotional distance or distraction.