Tissot, James The French painter James Joseph Jacques Tissot is known especially for his charming illustrations of Victorian life. After studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he fought in the Franco-Prussian War and then settled in England. As a caricaturist for Vanity Fair, he met London's social elite and became a fashionable portrait painter, especially of elegantly dressed women. In 1886, moved by a religious impulse, he made his first trip to Palestine and then devoted the next ten years to illustrating the Bible in watercolor paintings. His research for these works, many of which belong to the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, N.Y., was painstaking and often included visits to the sites of the biblical incidents.