A Winter's Walk

Kathleen Newton, Tissot's British mistress, is shown here as the personification of winter. Using female figures to represent the seasons or months of the year was a device popular among French and British artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A skilled printmaker as well as painter, Tissot used the drypoint engraving technique-in which grooves carved into the metal printing plate are not smoothed out and thus deposit thicker, slightly blurred lines of ink onto the paper-to render Newton's sumptuous fur collar.