Mrs. Kathleen Newton Portrait Oil Painting After James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot 26"

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A beautiful late 20th Century Oil Painting of Mrs. Kathleen Newton, after James Tissot. Signed lower left by Kurt Vaughn. … Read more A beautiful late 20th Century Oil Painting of Mrs. Kathleen Newton, after James Tissot. Signed lower left by Kurt Vaughn. The oil painting elegantly displays the French Aristocrat dressed in red in front of flowers resting her hand against her chin. Framed in wood with gold finish in Baroque manner.

Kathleen Irene Ashburnham Kelly Newton (1854 – 1882) first appeared in James Tissot’s paintings in 1876. Who was she? All we have to know her by are a few biographical facts researched by Tissot scholar Willard E. Misfeldt (b. 1930) and others, and dozens of paintings of Kathleen Newton by James Tissot.

According to Dr. Misfeldt, Kathleen Irene Kelly was born in May or June of 1854 in Agra, India. Her mother, Flora W. Boyd, passed away, and she and her brother, Frederick, and elder sister, Mary Pauline (“Polly,” 1851/52 – 1896), were the responsibility of their father, Charles Frederick Kelly (1810 – 1885). Mr. Kelly had been employed at the accountant’s office of the British East India Company in Agra from age 21 or 22 until his retirement to Conisbrough, South Yorkshire, in 1866. At some point around mid-1860, the family began to use Ashburnham as a middle name. Kathleen and Mary Pauline were sent back to England to be educated at Gumley House Convent School, Isleworth. When Kathleen was sixteen, a marriage was arranged for her, and she returned to India to marry Dr. Isaac Newton, a surgeon in the Indian civil service.

Dr. Misfeldt skirts the issue of what happened next, but after the wedding on January 3, 1871, the young bride is said to have followed the advice of the local priest and confessed to her new husband that while travelling on the ship to India, she had been involved with a Captain Palliser. She was sent back to England, gave birth to a daughter, Muriel Violet Mary Newton, in Conisbrough on December 20, and was officially divorced (decree nisi) by December 30. At some point, she moved in with her sister Polly, by then married and living with her two young daughters, Belle and Lilian, at 6 Hill Road, St. John’s Wood, London. There Kathleen gave birth to a son, Cecil George Newton, on March 21, 1876. (It is said that Polly’s husband, Mr. Hervey, was in the Indian civil service.)

James Tissot had left Paris following the bloody Commune in 1871, and by early 1873, he had bought the lease on a medium-sized, two-storey Queen Anne-style villa, built of red brick with white Portland stone dressing, at 17 (now 44), Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood.

The residents of the comfortable suburban homes around the Regent’s Park and the district of St. John’s Wood, west of the park, were merchants, bankers and lawyers. Tissot’s house was set in a large and private garden separating him from the horse traffic, omnibuses and pedestrians on their way to the park or the still-new Underground Railway station nearby. Kathleen lived just around the corner, and legend has it that she met Tissot while mailing a letter at a postbox.

Dimensions:
22.5" x 3" x 26.5"; canvas 12 x 16 See less