Sex, Science, and Space in James Tissot's London Conservatory
��� magine that it is 1874. You are French critic Edmond de Goncourt, and you hear wild rumors about a fellow countryman’s success in London. Your old friend, the painter and illustrator James Tissot, has built a home in fashionable St. John’s Wood, the centerpiece of which is an elaborately decorated studio with an attached conservatory. Even as you must admit to being impressed at the painter’s set-up, you also find it a little difficult to keep your eyes from rolling at his display of opulence. You record the gossip in your journal that night, calling Tissot an “ingenious exploiter of English foolishness” and describing sarcastically the “studio with a waiting room where, at all times there is iced champagne at the disposal of visitors, and around the studio, a garden, where all day long one can see a footman in silk stockings brushing and shining the shrubbery leaves” (qtd. in Wentworth 122). Can your dismissal of Tissot’s new digs be chalked up to jealousy? Or does your disapproval of the free-flowing liquor, the dandified footmen, and the gleaming plant life point to something more? This paper falls firmly on the side of “something more,” using Tissot’s paintings of the Victorian conservatory to show that this space was a complex site wherein contemporary ideas and anxieties about