If you’ve stood at the corner of Michigan and Adams this summer and looked up at the banners on the face of the Art Institute, you may have met the expectant gaze of Kathleen Kelly Newton, a sun-washed, copper-haired Victorian beauty, resplendent in a froth of white ruffles and pale golden bows.
Kathleen Kelly was born in 1854 to Irish parents in Lahore, the “Pearl of Punjab,” where her father, an officer in the British Indian army, was stationed. Convent educated, after her mother died she was sent to boarding school in England, which is where she was at the age of 17, when her father decided it was time for her to marry. He arranged a match with an older man, Isaac Newton (not that one), a surgeon in the Indian Civil Service, and literally shipped her off like a mail-order bride.
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Working under his anglicized first name, Tissot pulled off another meteoric rise, painting exquisitely exacting scenes of London society and its foibles that were refreshingly free of the usual Victorian sentimentality. The critics of his day didn’t much like his work—the English dismissed him as French, the French came to think he was too English, and both faulted his fashion-obsessed middle-class subjects as vulgar—but it commanded handsome prices. In 1873 he purchased a home near the one in which Kathleen Newton was living with her sister, and sometime after that—perhaps on a stroll through the hood?—he met the woman whose piquant face and delicate form he seemed to have presaged in his earlier paintings. In 1876 Newton added a second, unthinkable blot on her reputation by giving birth to a son usually assumed to be Tissot’s, and she and the children moved into his house.
Through 9/29
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