The record prices that works by James Tissot have fetched at auction, as well as the appeal of his subjects to a general public, might well have turned contemporary critical attention away from an artist who, after all, no longer needs to be rediscovered (consider especially the writings of Michael Wentworth). Tissot’s immediate facility would seem to render critical analysis superfluous, analysis certainly less nimble than the artist’s brush. But with a taste for paradox, not the least of the devices available to aesthetic studies, the challenge has been taken up and—it has to be conceded straightaway—with a certain pertinence. The title of the collection of essays emerging from the colloquium organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Seductive Surfaces: The Art of Tissot, suggests that the oeuvre conceals hidden territories and latent complexities. The insinuations of genre painting combined with the enigmas of the artist’s life offer a wide field for this game, at least for anyone who looks at these fashionable canvases with some attentiveness. The ten contributions, almost all of them by female scholars, collected and introduced by Katharine Lochnan, illuminate various aspects, more or less original, of this field. The internal richness of Tissot’s...