Félix Tisot

The quiet little port

1970

Atelier Félix TISOT (1909-1979) Félix TISOT my father once wrote this powerful sentence: "Our eyes open when those of ours close". This quote came back to my memory while I was walking, not long ago, at the Orsay museum on the floor of the Impressionists. Most of the masterpieces that paraded before my eyes seemed to make me an eye because I discovered in each of them the same colors as found in the works of my father who is now gone. Yes, "our eyes open when those of ours close." Up to Claude Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare where I imagined that the olive trees of the Midi landscapes painted by my father could have taken root under its canopy, thus hampering the smooth running of the locomotive entering the Paris station . I was flabbergasted. It was a fact, The poppies of Claude Monet or Chemin ascending in the tall grass of Pierre-Auguste Renoir exhale the same heat which escapes from the fabrics of Félix TISOT, as in La route de Louveciennes by Camille Pissarro however covered of snow. How did my father manage to appropriate light and colors, blues, ochres, greens, whites, yellows, violets by Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Bazille, Cézanne , Sisley and even Degas to project them into his paintings? Félix TISOT would therefore be "the last of the Impressionists"? The day will come when he will be recognized as such, I trust! I want to quote an anecdote. My father spent the last seven years of his life in the company of Suzy, my mother with me in Paris. The success of his exhibitions was such that he liked to say: "Paris, for me, is Lourdes! "Sometimes he would compose his landscapes in Sanary in the Var when he resided there, but when he came back to Paris, observing his paintings, he found himself quite crumpled:" Damn! Where did the light go? "It was easy to understand: in the South no need to put light in a canvas, the light is in the air, it is ambient and bathes the canvas. But once in Paris, we realize that the light has remained below. With brush strokes, you have to strive to reconstruct in the canvas this light of the South without whom things would be only what they are. Félix TISOT, my father, then got down to it, joining by the great mystery of the imagination, the luminance of the canvases of the great Impressionists which was imprinted in his memory. Thus, "his eyes opened when those of the famous Impressionists closed". Henri TISOT (1937-2011), actor, the son of the painter Félix TISOT who considered it the most beautiful work of his life. Sacred Dad!