Talk:James Tissot/GA2

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 11:34, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Comments

This article has certainly not been copied from the three sources that Earwig found had matching text, so we must presume that even the Tate lifted the WP summary for their short article.

Tate includes a WP attribution at the bottom of the page so Hellenica and Harbor Creek were the only ones under suspicion Orchastrattor (talk) 22:49, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Ah, good, I'd looked at their text but didn't spot the attribution; so the copyright issue is resolved, as I thought.

What does "record prices" mean? Record for a Tissot?

Hold Not a clue, don't have access. Remove or no? Orchastrattor (talk) 00:01, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Um, well as it's not definable we'd better reword it, say to high prices. Chiswick Chap (talk) 04:30, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Done

"reportedly referred to Tissot as" => "is said to have called Tissot".

Done

"Tissot would frequently refer to these years" => "Tissot often called these years".

Not Done Just sounds better in my opinion, also I think the "would" is justified here to make clear that its something from a nearer past being introduced only to contextualize something earlier on the timeline. Orchastrattor (talk) 01:17, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Hmm, please let's try to write simply and plainly. Best is chronological order with no jumping back and forth. You can say 'Later, he called these years ...' with no need for mental gymnastics. Chiswick Chap (talk) 04:34, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Done

"would come to encompass" => "came to encompass". And so on for the other uses of "would", all of which seem to be needlessly complex: please replace them.

Done "encompassed"

"in 1860, with the painting being exhibited" => "in 1860. The painting was exhibited"

Done "The painting went on to be exhibited"

"at the London gallery of Ernest Gambart." => "at Ernest Gambart's gallery in London."

Partially Done "at the gallery of art dealer Ernest Gambart in London."

Caption: "Japoniste movement, in which he is sitting below a Japanese screen" => "Japoniste movement. He is depicted sitting below a Japanese screen".

Done

"A strong recurring theme throughout Tissot's middle career was the exploration of social and sexual tension between men and women in the context of strictly gender-segregated Victorian society.[23]" Ref [23] only partly supports this claim.

Hold Would this and the Hamilton Spec ref be satisfactory together with Auckland? Orchastrattor (talk) 21:45, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

That link asks for a private login so I can't see it. Please just go ahead with it.

Done Added abstract

Referencing

Please remove all refs ([1] [2] [3]) from the lead section; the material is already cited in the article body.

Partially Done MOS:LEADCITE still suggests trying to give readers an idea of the wider sourcing in the lead so I'm leaving behind "ODNB" to make sure the source for a huge plurality of the article content is put forth early on. Orchastrattor (talk) 21:45, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

The attribution to Chisholm / EB 1911 is not substantiated by a comparison so I suggest we just remove it. It seems that this is further redundant to ref [1], which is itself used redundantly to other refs, and is (trebly) redundant by being used to cite the lead section. I therefore suggest we remove all instances of [1] from the article.

Partially Done It's still necessary for an uncorroborated claim early on in Mature Career, and there's a spot in Late Career where it both provides a primary source for the period just around the height of the biblical works' popularity and additionally fleshes out the Brooklyn claim in what I think is a very complementary way. Orchastrattor (talk) 21:45, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Understood.

Ref [17] Paquette is not a reliable source.

Done replaced

Ref [22] Paquette is another page from the same unreliable source.

Done reverted to earlier version of sentence

Ref [29] is from FindMyPast, an unreliable genealogy page.

Done wiped

Ref [21] Britannica is a pretty poor source. It'd certainly be better if we could use something a bit better; the subject of Japanism/Japonisme has been exhaustively treated by scholars.

Not Done The details of Tissot's relationship with Japonisme already seem to be covered by "J3Ren" so from my reading it only needs a quick dictionary definition while the Japonisme hyperlink covers any additional information readers might be interested in. I can substantiate it some more if you really insist but is there some sort of guideline or precedent against using EB in this manner? Orchastrattor (talk) 21:45, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Like Wikipedia, it's a tertiary source, written neither by scholars nor by historians. We can use it in desperation but it's far better to use the sources that we hope EB has used. So, yes, please substantiate.

Done

Refs [13], [14] "Reference Collection Search" are malformed. The citation requires the actual title of the painting and the access date. I strongly suggest you use a citation format to ensure suitable formatting.

Done Meant to clean those up before the review but it slipped my mind

Ref [18] Art UK may possibly be reliable, but its content "see extended Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists biography, under 'artist profile'" is not correctly cited. The citation also lacks an access date.

Done

Ref [36] Wilde needs something more precise than the title of the entire book. Ideally a page number from the print book, or at least a chapter number and title.

Partially Done Work name as part of anthology, pages were untranscribed unfortunately

It's "Miscellanies" not "Miscillanies". Please add "From Dublin University Magazine, July 1877." (which is stated in the Gutenberg file): that will close this item.

Done

Many refs, e.g. [3] [5], [6], [7] etc etc need access dates; where available they should also have author and publication date. Please check all the refs.

WIP Everything seems to be lining up so far apart from [5], I left a {cn} I'll have to look into later.

Done

I'm not convinced that the French chat in ref [24] suggesting something between a pun and a folk etymology is encyclopedic; and nor is the tone of "Some historians have even suggested...", especially as [24] doesn't actually name the "quoique des historiens" in question, i.e. it's unattributed speculation on their part. Further, I'm not convinced that "Connaisances des arts" is a reliable source. It is a commercial website calling for subscriptions and offering tickets and other wares. I suggest we stick to definitely-reliable textbooks of art, scholarly papers, art journals and so forth.

Hold I was working backwards from an unsourced claim on another page so thanks for catching that. I think I can somewhat corroborate it through this and some Francophone sources I don't have access to but I'd be willing to kill my darlings on this one since the main idea of the paragraph works with or without this sentence. Orchastrattor (talk) 21:45, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Done wasn't unsourced, they just weren't using inline formatting so I had to dig it up myself

The "Death and legacy" paragraph is not clearly cited. I suspect that [2] applies to the text from "Widespread use.." onwards, but [36]'s presence confuses this. Please add repeat citation(s) as needed to clarify the attributions.

Partially Done I don't have access but I managed to find some other references for it.

There are some citation needed tags in the article.

WIP Shipboard was easy enough but the other instance is something I'll have to look into more closely. It's only a preamble so if I don't find anything I'd be fine with just wiping it.

Done

Headings

The section "Mature life and career" covers several significant topics under its broad umbrella. I suggest we divide it into subsections, for example "Sovereigns", "Japonisme" (or should that be "Japanism", please pick just one), "Impressionism", "Sexuality", etc.

Not Done I was considering breaking off an "analysis" subsection but there's just not enough of a distinction between biographical and analytic content, it all segues from one to the other too smoothly. The only reason "Family life and bereavement" works as a heading is because its such a personal aspect of a specific stretch of his life, followed by a very clean window from '82 to '86 where he didn't work on anything outside of the one 15-painting series.

Even if we widen the scope of a "Sovereigns" section to be about his Vanity Fair work in general there's just not enough meat to fill out a full subsection; It starts out with a connective sentence to his time in the war and ends with his criticism of the French and German governments that then bounces the article back into discussing how the corruption and warmongering of those two governments influenced his painting.

I suppose the gender and sexuality spiel is independent enough but at that point the rest of the article is so strictly chronological it would feel completely crowbarred in. Orchastrattor (talk) 00:00, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Images

I know this is a painter article so some leeway with long galleries is expected, but since we already have multiple images and structured (relevant) galleries in the main text, it's very hard to see why we also need an enormous unstructured "Gallery" as an additional section at the end. Commons is the place for unstructured lists of images.

Partially Done I went through to cull anything I didn't feel contribute enough to the wider impression of the article, however there is a large number of paintings mentioned by name in the body but not included anywhere other than the main gallery; additionally Hush is the only piece in the Mature Career section not to specifically be placed there to reflect some wider analytical point being made in the text so I think that omitting too much can risk skewing the reader's impression too far away from the less transgressive areas of his career.

There is indeed a Paintings by James Tissot on Commons that we could link under See Also or External Links. Orchastrattor (talk) 02:03, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Good idea, please do that, and remove the end-placed "Gallery" section. If you then feel the need to reinstate a few images from there that serve a useful purpose supporting the text in one section or another, please feel free to do so.

Partially Done Added the link, but there's already a precedent for artist GAs like Skagen Painters, Ivan Aivazovsky, or Karoly Grosz (illustrator) concentrating a large part of their work in a single gallery at the middle or end point of the page. The alternatives are either something like Benjamin West, with a solid line of works constantly running down the right side that still runs out of room before it can cover some important aspects of his corpus that then have to filled out by the gallery at the bottom, or to simply bring up works in the text that the reader will have no way of looking at without following a link to another page or even to another domain entirely, which I think will be far more damaging to comprehension compared to just having an extra bit of scrolling between the body and the see also. Orchastrattor (talk) 19:03, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm afraid there are still far more images than are needed to illustrate points made in the text. This falls foul of WP:NOTCAT, and the mix of side images, vaguely connected small galleries and to boot also a massive unnecessary rump gallery that does not connect to anything just looks ans is a disorganised mess. The WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument is always one to avoid as it had nothing to do with any criterion; the article cannot pass in such a disorganised state. Chiswick Chap (talk) 04:54, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Would you like to call in a third opinion on this? MOS:VISUAL#Galleries specifically recommends including a single gallery, seemingly regardless of what images may or may not be included standalone in the body. It's simply an intuitive and well-established method of showcasing a reasonable sample of an artist's work outside of its immediate relevance to the text. Trying to limit images to standalones in the body would, again, be impractical due to how many different ideas and motifs he explored in his work, and if we tried to limit it only to those mentioned in the text would risk bias as the only places in "Mature life and career" that mention specific works are a segment about geopolitical themes, a segment on sexual themes, and a segment on Newton because those are the only important, recurring subjects I could corroborate as such across multiple sources. Each only represents a small fraction of his contemporary work and even together they would leave out a lot of other works that could still be considered significant to his career. Orchastrattor (talk) 02:59, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

No thanks. I think you're reading the policy very selectively. It says several pertinent things, including that "A Wikipedia article gallery should not just replicate a Commons gallery, but should use images with editorial judgement, as would be given to text, with the validity of inclusion of each image considered (my emphasis). See WP:IG for the policy from the Wikipedia Manual of Style." In other words, this is not a place for WP:INDISCRIMINATE use of images (or of anything else); Wikipedia is not a catalogue WP:NOTCAT. The policy further states that we can use either "small galleries...in the body of the text" or "one gallery at the end of the article" which "may be more appropriate, though it notes that you can have separate galleries for "earlier and later works". Finally it suggests arranging galleries chronologically (by date of creation). All of this says that there should be rather few images, arranged decently and in order. None of those things are currently true. The impression at the moment is of a chaotic mass of images of different sizes, organised according to different principles in different places. Given that there are already many images (32, in fact) in the text, each group serving at least some sort of visible purpose with thematic relevance, it is very difficult to see what the encyclopedic purpose of the additional gallery (another 33 images!) at the end could be. It's overkill, and you know it. I suggest you cut down on the number of images in EACH gallery to avoid the impression, which is transmitted to the reader loud and clear at the moment, that the article is a vehicle for as many images as possible. Please note also

Criterion 3b: "it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style)."

Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:04, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I don't see how an ending gallery of the type recommended in VISUAL is antithetical to editorial judgement, we can always just introduce some sort of strict outline for it to follow; Say something like four wide scenes, five portraits, and two-to-three miscellaneous compositions, with priority for any works mentioned in the sources or notable enough for standalone articles (excluding cases such as Portsmouth Dockyard and On The Thames where one is only mentioned as the basis of the other, and (if possible) counting the Holyday-Convalescent diptych as a single item). That would cut the ending gallery down to as little as a third of its size with very clear criteria for what is and isn't notable enough for inclusion. Additionally, the main body galleries are formatted with the intent of appearing as a single item, I can remove some of the works and tighten the formatting to improve that impression but in either case I think it would be inaccurate to count them as individual paintings the way you would for the ending gallery, and also doesn't allow for them to function as a potential replacement for the ending gallery.

I still think we should call in a third opinion as this seems like a genuine oversight or point of conflict in the guidelines - any generalized gallery for a single artist is by its very nature not going to have any categorizing principles beyond an arbitrary relevance to the article subject. Orchastrattor (talk) 17:38, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

You are missing the point. There is no disagreement or ambiguity in the guidelines. It is also not the pure number of images that is at issue here, though there is no doubt that you are trying to include an exceptionally large number, and I certainly think there are far more than could reasonably be justified in terms of supporting the existing text. (It may be helpful to point out that many reviewers at both GAN and FAC more or less completely reject any use of galleries as unstructured, and insist on having just one or two images per section of text, provided that the images are not so large relative to the text that they either cause sandwiching or flow into the following section --- so one needs several hundred words per image.) The problem is rather that the images are contributing to making the article appear hopelessly disorganized. You might fix this by cutting down on the various galleries; by removing the seemingly-redundant end gallery --- if there are galleries in the text supporting the text, it is not easy to see why an additional gallery that does not support the text in any discernible way ("oh, and by the way, if you read all that with the supporting images, now here's an equally large pile of unconnected stuff") could possibly be necessary; or by adding more subsections of text to explain the stages of Tissot's artistic career in a finer-grained manner, and then to allocate those of the images that are actually useful to those subsections. But you have already rejected the subsections idea, and the removal of the end gallery. To reiterate, for the last time now, the problem is not just having an end gallery; it's having such a thing in conjunction with a large number of images in the text already. On your point that a gallery of N images somehow doesn't count as N but as some smaller number, it's an argument I've not heard in many years of reviewing, and I'm afraid that it won't do. The "Sovereigns", for instance, could be represented pretty adequately with just one image as an example of the approach; there is no inherent implication that we must have a complete set, and indeed the gallery does not represent all the sovereign paintings anyway --- so one might wonder why we need so many examples, just as one might wonder why the same thing is happening throughout the article. It comes across as a large amount of special pleading; we will do much better just to do things the usual way, which can be summarized as not having so many images that they swamp the text. Unfortunately that is exactly what the images are doing at the moment. Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:07, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Ok sorry you were being unclear in your earlier messages, you're saying I should either:

A) Remove the gallery completely and leave the amount of images in the body text the same or lower;

or B) Concentrate the images in the end gallery and leave the body text with way fewer images;

With you heavily suggesting A) as the preferable option, correct? I looked through and I think I can add another chronological break under a "Post-war career" subsection in case that would make image allocation easier. Orchastrattor (talk) 19:50, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

That's about it, yes. If there are more subsections and more cited text, more images can reasonably be carried. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:54, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Done Orchastrattor (talk) 00:15, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

That said, why is there a gallery just on "Sovereigns" in "Mature life and career"? Perhaps with the new sub-headings we have now inserted, it will fit better in a subsection called "Sovereigns", indeed. Perhaps, too, the other subsections will benefit from a SMALL gallery each (and perhaps some of those images are currently lost in the Giga-Gallery at the end).

All four of the main-body galleries are covering a specific series of works, Sovereigns is important to make sure readers get an idea of his caricaturist work alongside his better-known output as a painter. I really don't see how we wouldn't be risking confusion if we have galleries of specific series next to more general collections of whatever we feel like bringing up in a given subsection. Orchastrattor (talk) 02:03, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Um, I've been happy all along with the main-body galleries, it's the large unstructured one at the end that is the issue, though there's a clear mismatch between the section title and the Sovereigns gallery.

I'd suggest you use "mode=nolines" for the remaining galleries to suppress the framing of individual images.

Not Done Tested it out and it makes the captions too difficult to discern at a glance, and the Vanity Fair photos just don't look as good without the border. Orchastrattor (talk) 19:03, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Image "Still on Top" needs "|upright" format.

Done

Images "Hush!" and "The Garden Bench" need the "|upright=1.5" parameter removed to use the default format.

Not Done Those were rescaled to fit better in the text, they're both horizontal compositions balancing many different subjects making their scale far more particular than the vertical works in the same section. Orchastrattor (talk) 19:03, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Summary

Glad to see the article in such good shape now. I am confident that it now meets the criteria and hope that you feel that the effort was rewarded with a robust and defensible GA. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:51, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.