The Grapes of Canaan 1902

James Tissot painted *The Grapes of Canaan* in oil on wood, but there is nothing wooden about the way he handles his materials! Look at how Tissot uses the brushstrokes, particularly in the figures’ clothing. He is not trying to hide the process. The paint is applied in very thin layers, but you can easily see the direction of each stroke. See, on the man on the left’s fur skirt, how each flick of white paint is left as it is, creating the illusion of a textural surface? I love how the artist handles the rendering of the grapes themselves! It is almost like an exercise in abstraction. See how each individual grape is represented by a single, small daub of paint. It becomes an interesting back and forth between realism and pure painting. Tissot was part of a generation of artists who were very interested in the techniques of printmaking, and his approach to painting here is somewhat similar to the way one might build up an image through the accumulation of many small marks in an etching or aquatint. Think of Manet’s approach to painting, or even the later pointillist experiments of Seurat, and you will see that this idea of the artwork as a sum of its parts was very much in the air at the time.