Biblical Apparitions in an Age of Spiritualism: The Ghost Paintings of James Tissot

The “ghost paintings” of James Tissot depict supernatural figures that appear in both his society paintings and his late biblical cycle. From The Apparition to his biblical paintings, including He Vanished from Their Sight, The Dead Appear in the Temple, The Dead Appear in Jerusalem, and Jesus Transported by a Spirit onto a High Mountain, Tissot’s paintings present a reenchanted vision of the New Testament for the increasingly secular nineteenth century. His 350-painting collection titled The Life of Christ bears the unmistakable marks of the nineteenth-century fascination with Catholic revivalism, spiritualism, seances, and psychical research. In spite of the fantastical subject matter of these paintings, Tissot depicts Jesus’ miraculous life, death, and resurrection with a startling ethnographic and quasi-documentary precision. Even a century later, Tissot’s ghost paintings remain an example of how nineteenth-century biblical art absorbed and reimagined spiritualism, rendering the Gospel narratives newly strange and uncanny for modern audiences.