A Winter's Walk

The model for James Tissot's monument to Victorian beauty was his own love, the divorcée Kathleen Newton. She appeared in several of his paintings and prints before dying of tuberculosis in 1882, and she was already quite ill when this etching was made. Tissot was so proud of this work that he signed it, an honor he reserved only for superior prints. Distraught after Newton's death, he abandoned his lucrative career of etching London's high society and returned to Paris. This was despite the hopeful verse he appended to A Winter's Walk, suggesting Newton's beauty would live on to cancel out the bleakness of winter.