James Tissot - La demoiselle de magasin

James Tissot, The Shop Girl (La demoiselle de magasin), 1883-85, oil on canvas, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Viewers of this painting find themselves standing in as imagined shoppers, customers of a fancy Parisian draper’s shop. The young assistant looks towards us, politely holding the door open with her immaculately manicured fingers resting on the handle as she prepares to usher our departure. She holds two wrapped parcels of goods, one pink, one white. These are the purchases we have just made, and which are about to be handed to us. The artist here is inviting us to consider not just the role of the shop girl and the commercial activity that takes place in a marchand de nouveautés but the wider context of art itself as a commodity to be bought and sold. It is as if by positioning us, the onlookers, as clients, that the idea of us as potential art punters, sales marks for this or any other painting for that matter, is also knowingly hypothesised. We are not just art appreciators but all part of the same transactional system.

The painting places a heavy emphasis on ‘stuff,’ in the textile meaning of the word. Unspooled ribbons sit in a tangle on the counter and overspill its edge. The window display consists of a vertical garniture of cockades and ruched trims and flowers while beside it a tailor’s dummy displays the upper boddice of a tightly fitted dress while another garment lies discarded behind it. The two shop assistants wear the respectable black dresses which were de rigueur for their role at the time; the girls were there to serve, and their clothing should never have been seen to compete with their customers’. But their outfits are closely tailored to their slender figures and their discreet detailing, such as their lace cuffs, is so on point as to remind us of their modishness, despite their lack of colour. A strong sense of physical materiality permeates the work.

Meanwhile, on the street outside, a full bearded, top-hatted, and bespectacled bourgeois gent peers through the glass and seems to ogle the shapeliness of the assistant handing down a box from an upper shelf, while she meets his gaze. His overcoat and the imagined indecency of what his hidden-from-view hands might be up to is indicative of his sensate corporeality. At the same time a young woman passing by has her hat and collar decorated with a saucily bright red ribbon. Her eyes are cast downwards mock-demurely as another gentleman, with the blond moustaches of a gallant, tips his hat at her presence, the display of etiquette a gesture of his admiration or of their prior acquaintance. We see his leather glove as yet another haptic textile, another body covering that gestures at his class, but whose stylish yet unadorned masculinity contrasts with the female fripperies on display inside.

At the top of the painting a striped awning is depicted above the shopfront. It provides a guard against the fading effect of sunlight on fabric, and the same kind of canopies decorate the emporia on the other side of the street too. The effect is to envelop the store itself with its own canvas ‘stuff,’ the jauntily scalloped edges of which are suggestive of frivolity and function as an inducement to enter, to indulge and to spend. The orange bands of its pattern are echoed in the edge bindings of the carpet, and I like the little imperfection detail with one of its sides slightly curling over against the entrance skirting. The awning also allows the face and the high chignon hairstyle of the shop girl to be backlit, amplifying the shop interior’s sense of theatricality.

The painting is an astute study in class and class relationships. The principal shop girl figure holds her head and body slightly aslant with her left hand on the handle as she squeezes self-effacingly behind the door to remain at the service of the customer. Her subservience is however, a little ambivalent. Although she is a working-class woman and at the behest of her ‘betters,’ the shop is her domain and as a wage-earner she has achieved a measure of independence and cachet. But as Emile Zola had described in his department store-set novel Au Bonheur des Dames, despite the modernity of their apparent emancipation as an emergent class, women working in shops still faced a struggle of long hours, poor pay, and the perception that they were sexually available. Their situation was precarious in that their visibility, behind the newly invented large sheets of shop glass, and their uncertain guardian-less status meant that they were often hit on by predatory men who sometimes failed to distinguish them from prostitutes. In addition, these women served not only their customers but the demands of commerce. While they obeyed the rules of customer interaction set for them by their employers, they were also obliged to comply with the many pecuniary protocols that shop transactions entailed. Any autonomy they enjoyed was always strictly controlled by the rules of class and commerce.

At the top of the painting, the arc of the shop’s name is seen in reverse, etched or painted on the glass but is indecipherable due to the cropping of the image. However, the faux coat of arms seen below tells us something of this establishment’s pretensions and looks a little like the French equivalent of the ‘by appointment’ emblems that grace the branding of certain suppliers to the royal household in Britain. The girl serves the upper middle classes but also the edifice of capitalist snobbery. As if to reinforce the social hierarchies, both real and ersatz, a livery-coated footman seen in profile, stands sentinel outside the shop, ready to hail a fiacre for its clientele, his hands clasped together deferentially. He waits, not on the pavement, but in the gutter. For all Tissot’s indulgence in the depiction of high fashion, we should also remember that he fought on the side of the communards and would have been by implication, a critic of social inequalities and rigid class stratification.

The tangle of ribbon and the displaced chair in front of the counter are evidence of the disarray caused by the actions of trying to satisfy the demanding customer’s needs. One of the ribbons has fallen to the floor and as some critics have observed, it has formed what they see as an ironic heart shape. Is this a sign that the pervy man leering through the window has lost his heart? Is the placement of the mannequin such that it obscures his own body an indication that his masculinity is somehow compromised by these women’s jurisdiction? I don’t buy this. It looks much more like a joke on Tissot’s part at the gentleman’s expense, like one of those seaside ‘head-through-the-hole’ boards designed for the amusement of onlookers. It’s like a little subversive pantomime that the girls in the shop might enjoy as a way to amuse themselves or distract themselves from the daily duress of difficult ladies and unwelcome male attention. The ornately carved gryphon that props up the counter, another showily inauthentic heraldic contrivance, has its tongue stuck out as if it’s a lewdly honest reflection of the lusting man’s true feelings. Its animality, as also implied by as many as eight horses visible in the street, gestures at hidden bestial appetites that are masked by metropolitan sophistication.

Tissot was often derided by contemporary critics for his suggestive takes on the manners of modern city living. Some saw him as overly facile, even superficial in his approach to his subjects. The fact that his art appealed to the wealthy was cited as evidence of his vulgarity, a fault only compounded by the realistic levels of finish that was felt to be antithetical to avant garde taste. But if only as a chronicler of the condition of women’s lives in the late nineteenth century city, a record of the spectacle that was Belle Époque Paris, of the press and hustle involved, he is hard to beat. Even his friend Degas, an inveterate painter of women in their many daily activities, observed them detachedly rather than as living breathing real people with real lives, loves and ambitions as Tissot did.

The obliging half smile that plays across the face of the shop girl looks like a mask that she puts on for her customers, but behind which lies a hidden expression of her true personality, and about which we can only speculate. What could be her narrative, her home life, her family background? The lived experience of the working women of the period was in an unprecedented state of flux and Tissot’s painting offers us a tantalising glimpse of it.