In 1877 Tissot painted two London art dealers. The first was his nephew Algernon Moses Marsden (1847-1920), a flamboyant young man-about-town who had set up in the trade five years earlier; the portrait, which shows him sprawled on a tiger-skin amid Aesthetic clutter, was acquired jointly in 2022 by the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery and is now one of the best-known images of late-Victorian dealing. The second was Marsden’s uncle, the older and more substantial dealer Edward Fox-White (1828–1900), the subject of the present picture. Tissot painted them in the same studio, in the same year. The two canvases, never seen together in their own century, were brought together for the first time at the National Portrait Gallery, where the Fox-White hung on long-term loan, only a wall away from his nephew, from June 2023 until May 2026.

The setting is Tissot’s own house. Fox-White is seated by a tall French window in the studio at 17 (now 44) Grove End Road, St John’s Wood, the Queen Anne villa the artist had bought in 1873 and to which, in 1875, he added the conservatory and the cast-iron Ionic colonnade ringing a formal pond. That colonnade and pond are the architecture of the great Grove End Road pictures: Holyday (c.1876, Tate), Hide and Seek (c. 1877, National Gallery of Art, Washington), The Hammock (c. 1880, private collection), and the photographs of his muse and lover Kathleen Newton in the garden. Through the right-hand pane of the window in the present picture, half-screened by climbing foliage, the colonnade’s piers are visible, and a single Ionic column rises from the foliage at the lower right. The colonnade was demolished in 1947 and the pond filled in; the picture is among very few canvases that record the garden Tissot built, and the only portrait in which a sitter is placed against it. The room records the artist as well as the sitter.

Fox-White is shown three-quarter length, seated on a low chair upholstered in deep blue, turned slightly to the picture plane and glancing up from the large sheet he holds. He wears a soft grey morning suit with a single-breasted waistcoat, a high white collar over a black cravat folded at the throat, and a blue-violet silk scarf or stock at the breast. This is the studio dress of a busy professional, not the swallow-tail of a portrait sitter. His face is broad and ruddy; the hair is an auburn brown receding above the temples and rising in disciplined curls; the moustache is full and waxed in the manner of the late 1870s. His gloved left-hand holds the upper edge of a large sheet of paper; the ungloved right grips the lower edge. The sheet is tipped towards him, so that the front is shielded from the viewer and only the reverse is part visible. He has been examining it, and looks up at the moment of being interrupted. The pose belongs to a documentary tradition of the dealer’s portrait, the practitioner shown in the act of his profession.

The sheet is almost certainly a print, the deep tone and sharp-edged line of the plate visible through the cream-buff paper. Fox-White’s business, established in Glasgow in 1854 and later in Mayfair and St James’s, dealt principally in etchings, watercolours and modern oil paintings; the standing inventory of such a gallery in 1877 was print stock, and the dealer’s working life was spent with sheets like this one in his hands.

Behind him, propped on an easel and dominating the left third of the canvas, is a large picture in a richly carved and water-gilded frame of Louis XV character: bound laurel, acanthus volutes, ribbon-and-flute hollow, swept shell-and-scroll cartouches at the corners. A dealer is being painted in a painter’s house, and an unfinished or unsold canvas in its frame stands between them on the easel: between the dealer who would sell such pictures and the painter who painted them. The sympathy is professional, between men who lived by the same trade.

Fox-White had bought and sold Tissot’s pictures in London from the early 1870s, helping the artist into the English market in the years after his arrival from Paris in May 1871. The nephew Marsden, who set up as a dealer in 1872 at the age of twenty-five, did similar work in a younger and more conspicuous manner; he commissioned his own portrait from Tissot in 1877 and bankrupted himself within four years. By the year of the two pictures, Tissot was at the peak of his English success, with a substantial London market built through Marsden, Fox-White, Agnew, Goupil and the Grosvenor Gallery. The Marsden portrait possesses more swagger; the Fox-White portrait is the quieter picture, painted of an older man with a longer career, whose taste and judgement Tissot evidently liked.

The pictures that passed through Fox-White’s gallery during these years were Old Master oils, British landscapes, contemporary French painting, and the etchings and watercolours that were the staple of the print room. Works by Gainsborough, Courbet, Whistler, Turner and Tissot are recorded among them. King Street, St James’s, his last and most settled address, sat at the heart of the West End picture trade through the 1880s and 1890s. The portrait Tissot painted for him was a private one and was almost certainly never intended for the exhibition wall. It hung where it was painted to hang, in Fox-White’s own house, until the family parted with it at Christie’s in 1988.

Such a portrait, a painter’s painting of his dealer, belongs to a small but distinct Victorian tradition. The Tissot precedes by six years Frank Holl’s Sir William Agnew, 1st Bt. of 1883 (National Portrait Gallery), which shows Agnew seated in front of Fred Walker’s The Wayfarers, a picture from his own stock. Twenty-one years later, Sargent painted Asher Wertheimer of 158 New Bond Street (1898, Tate Britain), the most ambitious of all such commissions and the head of what would become Sargent’s largest private series. The present picture is the earliest of the three, and the only one of the three to set its sitter inside the painter’s own house. It is also, in temperament, the most companionable: the great portraits of Agnew and Wertheimer are public images, of public figures, painted to confer authority; the Tissot is private, more intimate, and the warmer for it.

After being sold at auction in 1988 the picture passed by descent in the family to the present owner. Between June 2023 and May 2026 it was lent to the National Portrait Gallery, where it hung in Room 24 a few feet from the Marsden portrait the gallery had acquired in 2022. The two portraits, separated for almost a century and a half, were reunited on a single wall for the first time. Few of Tissot’s London portraits are finer than this one, and very few set their sitter inside the artist’s own studio.