About this work
*The Political Woman* — known in French as *L'Ambitieuse*, and sometimes called *The Reception* — belongs to a series of fifteen large paintings that Tissot executed between 1883 and 1885, each a sharp observation on late nineteenth-century Parisian society. At the center of this monumental canvas stands a young woman dressed with calculated splendor. Her pink dress, as described in the exhibition catalogue from the Arthur Tooth Gallery in London, is "a marvel of the dressmaker's art," its multitude of tiny flounces and black girdle offset by a pink sash, while the color of her pink ostrich feather fan has been "carefully studied and matched."
The political arena she inhabits is entirely a social one — Tissot implies through the composition that she aims to improve her position by making herself a vital and stylish presence in the ballrooms and salons of the French upper class.
The London exhibition catalogue put it plainly: she has "made what she believes to be a fair exchange of her beauty against her white-haired husband's position," managing political salons to engineer his ministerial ambitions.
Tissot returned to Paris immediately after his mistress and muse Kathleen Newton died of tuberculosis in November 1882, abandoning his St. John's Wood home.
Having been absent for over eleven years, he threw himself into re-establishing his reputation with the *La Femme à Paris* series, employing brighter, more modern colors than in his previous work.
The paintings premiered at the Galerie Sedelmeyer in Paris in 1885 and were poorly received — a critic for *La Vie Parisienne* complained the women were "always the same Englishwoman," while another dismissed them as "gracious puppets." Yet *L'Ambitieuse* proved compelling enough to attract serious collectors: the painting was owned by the American painter William Merritt Chase, who donated it to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in 1909.
The work carries an additional biographical charge — after the suspicions raised about Tissot's own conduct during the Paris Commune, his politics, like those of his Political Woman, had become strictly social.
This is a painting for a room that rewards looking. Its large scale and warm palette — blush pinks, creamy whites, the shimmer of a grand interior — suit a generous wall in a dining room, drawing room, or well-lit study. The subject herself demands attention without quite surrendering it: her gaze is engaged, her smile practiced, her intentions her own. She speaks to viewers drawn to the charged social theatre of the Belle Époque, to those who appreciate art that hides intelligence behind
