LIVES OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE
The E.J. Boys Archive

Coleraine Robert VANSITTART - 11th Husssars

James Tissot, The Circle of the Rue Royale

The Circle of the Rue Royale (1868), by James Tissot. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Coleraine Robert Vansittart lounges in a chair centre-left. An impressive range of precisely defined facial hair is depicted across the painting, but he alone sports a full beard.

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The Musee d'Orsay (and Wikipedia) misnames him as "Vansittant" and "Vansittard", and wrongly locates him in a key as the man standing behind. The men are members of the Paris Jockey Club, an exclusive group dedicated to "the improvement of horse breeding in France".

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Le Cercle de la rue Royale [The Circle of the Rue Royale]

From the Musee d'Orsay's online notes:

This imposing group portrait commissioned from Tissot at the end of the Second Empire invites us to access the intimacy of the Circle of the Rue Royale, a male club founded in 1852. Each one of the twelve models paid 1000 Francs for the painting to be made, and the final owner was to be determined via a special draw. Baron Hottinger, seated to the right of the sofa, was eventually named the winner. The painting remained in his family until it was acquired by the Musée d'Orsay.

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PB: Vansittart, with a full beard, is shown in the key as figure 5 but is in fact the seated figure 4. He is also wrongly named as "M.C. Vansittard" and elsewhere as "Vansittant".

Among the most remarkable personalities of the group is the Marquis de Galliffet, who would later be a ferocious opponent to the Paris Commune in 1871, standing to the right of the painting and leaning on an armchair where Prince Edmond-Melchior de Polignac is sitting. Standing to the far right of the painting is Charles Haas, who years later would become one of Marcel Proust's sources of inspiration for the character of Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.

Son of a fashion seller and a milliner, Tissot always gave particular attention to clothes in his painting. The Circle of the Rue Royale offered every opportunity to express this interest and demonstrate an extreme accuracy that vied with that of photography. Costumes and accessories rendered with many details testify to the taste of the aristocracy in the 1860s whilst showing the social status of these men captured in prestigious surroundings.

The scene takes place on one of the balconies of the Hôtel de Coislin that still overlooks the Place de la Concorde. The carriage and passers-by one can see through the balustrade convey the animation of the square, whilst above the trees one can distinguish the roofs of the Palais de l'Industrie built for the 1855 World Fair and now destroyed.

Not unusual for Tissot, the painter seems to have played with different registers, mingling several artistic references. Still loyal to Ingres's teaching, close to those who were to become the Impressionists, he broke free from French tradition by staging this group portrait outside, in the style of British conversation pieces.

A major example of Tissot's modernity, emblematic of the intellectual and mundane atmosphere of the time, this piece contributed to the young painter's recognition as he was emerging as one of the most talented portrait painters of his generation.

[Source: Musee d'Orsay: James Tissot, The Circle of the Rue Royale, 1868. (accessed 14.3.2013).]

Coleraine Vansittart, aka "Poppy".

"Poppy" Vansittart, photographed in the 1870s?

[Source: photograph in EJBA, unknown source and date. I would be grateful if any readers could help.]

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Coleraine Vansittart was known to his friends and family [and regiment?] as "Poppy", on account of his vivid red hair and great height. (His father was even taller,in fact one of the tallest men ever to have served in the Household Cavalry.)

He was a crack pigeon shot, and with his friends Lords Huntingfield and Stanford made the sport of pigeon shooting fashionable after his return from the Crimea. He was one of the founders of the Gun Club, and was also a member of the Hurlingham Club, on the banks of the Thames near Putney, London.

Vansittart resided mostly in Paris, and was one of the originators of the French shooting club in the Bois du Boulogne, the "Tir au Pigeon", where a prize named after him was shot for annually.

Sometime a patron of the Turf, he ran horses in France during the Second Empire. An excellent judge of a horse and a personal friend of Napoleon III, he was invariably consulted as to the horses in the Imperial stables.

In 1868 Vansittart accompanied his friend Prince Achille Murat (who had married the Princess Mingrelia) on his honeymoon to the Caucasus, the Emperor putting a French warship at their disposal for the voyage. After spending some time in Russia and Persia, he returned to Paris, where he died on 14th of April 1886. His body was brought back to England and buried at St Mary's, Walton on Thames.

Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity

According to Jeanne Willette, in a detailed review of the Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity exhibition held at the Musee d'Orsay in 2012-13:

"[U]pper class males have their own attitudes of privilege and poise and some of these paintings reveal the psychology of the unconscious advantages of their class. James Tissot's The Circle of Rue Royale (1868) displays a group of men with prerogatives displaying themselves to each other on the neo-classical pavilion of the Gabriel balcony of the Jockey Club. Located in the Hôtel Scribe at this time, the Jockey Club was dedicated, as it said, to "the improvement of horse breeding in France".

According to the Musée d'Orsay, the scene is set on "one of the balconies of the Hôtel de Coislin" and it should be noted that each languid aristocrat is a portrait of actual pedigreed males: the Comte Alfred de la Tour-Maubourg (1834-1891) the Marquis Alfred du Lau d'Allemans (1833-1919), the Comte Étienne de Ganay (1833-1903), the Capitaine Coleraine Vansittart (1833-1886), the Marquis René de Miramon (1835-1882), the Comte Julien de Rochechouart (1828-1897), the Baron Rodolphe Hottinguer (1835-1920), the Marquis Charles-Alexandre de Ganay (1803-1881), the Baron Gaston de Saint-Maurice (1831-1905), the Prince Edmond de Polignac (1834-1901), the Marquis Gaston de Galliffet (1830-1909), and Charles Haas (1833-1902).

Tissot's aristocrats at The Jockey Club

No one depicted this kind of rarified male better than Tissot, a French artist in exile, who lived and worked in London, the original home of the original Jockey Club and perfectly captured the aristocratic male at his apogee in the twilight of the nineteenth century. To my mind, the greatest portraits of the these decades are devoted, not to women, but to these peacock males: John Singer Sargent's Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881) and most of all, Tissot's portrait of Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1870).

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Alone amidst incongruous floral furniture, the British Captain of the Royal Horse Guards lounges at his ease, mustaches waxed and uptilted, cigarette at attention between his graceful fingers. To the eyes of an untutored American, Burnaby looks "French, " but "Fred", as he was called, was decidedly English. In fact his mannered style, the epitome of male mannerism, was the very essence of all that was the British aristocracy at its peak and it was this aspect of all things English that wafted across the Chanel as "Anglomania."

The French aristocrats at the Jockey Club are echoes and copies of Burnaby, most of them without his adventurousness and bravery, as are their favorite sports from yachting to tennis to horseracing to the very concept of "sport" itself - all British exports...

These wealthy men seem idle and without purpose; they are rarely engaged in any meaningful activity and, in their pointless lives, seem to exemplify the alienation discussed by the catalogue."

[Source: jeannewillette.com/2012/12/15/impressionism-fashion-and-modernity-at-the-met-part-one (dated 15.12.2013, accessed 13.3.2013). By 2015 this article has migrated to arthistoryunstuffed.com/impressionism-fashion-and-modernity-part-two. See also parts one, three, and four.]

Impressionism and Fashion

According to the Musee d'Orsay's backround notes:

The Parisian Man of the World

The choice of clothes for men was particularly limited in the second half of the 19th century. Colour disappeared and was replaced by plain dark shades; woollen cloth replaced velvet, silk and brocade.

Moreover, it became usual to adapt the same outfit for use on different occasions. The Parisian man, once he had stepped out of his dressing gown, wore two outfits in turn: one for the day and one for the evening.

The overall look of men's clothes changed very little. The upper body was tightly fitted into a jacket or frock coat, both invariably in dark colours, sometimes double-breasted, and whose tails varied in length. The short jacket was only worn at holiday resorts. On the other hand, the paletot jacket, a sort of short overcoat, was adopted at this time, the cut requiring no great skill.

There was a greater range of fabrics used for trousers, always cut wide, available in a large number of patterns, including stripes, checks and hound's tooth motifs. These were worn with a slight crease, and a break on to short boots with heels that varied in

Height: A top hat was the headwear of choice, and a cane, umbrella and gloves completed the outfit for the man who was ready to go out. But above all else he was judged by the cleanliness of his cuffs and shirt collar - either straight or winged - and by his tie which had to be of a certain width.

In 1858 Théophile Gautier attacked a certain type of artist who claimed that black suits and jackets were an obstacle to creating masterpieces: "Are our clothes so ugly? Do they not have a meaning, little understood, sadly, by those artists steeped in old-fashioned ideas? With their simple cut and neutral colours, they allow the eye to be drawn to the head, the seat of intelligence, and to the hands, the tools of the intellect and a sign of breeding".

A few years later in 1863, Ernest Chesneau proclaimed, "If a great painter, alumiériste, is bold enough to depict modern life, and if he is truly a painter, if he does not mock his subject, if he has courage and a touch of genius, he will create a masterpiece from our black suits and our paletot jackets."

[Source: Musee d'Orsay: Exhibitions - L'Impressionnisme et la mode, p.4 (accessed 13.3.2013).]

Spot the cigarettes

Notice incidentally the presence of (rather stylishly held) cigarettes in the hands of three of the men, including Coleraine Vansittart - and indeed carelessly discarded on the floor. The smoking of cigarettes and cheroots was greatly stimulated by the Crimean War.