He is best known for a variety of genre paintings of contemporary European high society produced during the peak of his career, which focused on the people and women's fashion of the Belle Époque and Victorian England, but he would also explore many medieval, biblical, and Japoniste subjects throughout his life.

[4] Around this time, Tissot also made the acquaintance of the American James McNeill Whistler, and French painters Edgar Degas (who had also been a student of Lamothe and a friend of Delaunay), and Édouard Manet.

[13] Having already worked as a caricaturist for Thomas Gibson Bowles, the owner of the magazine Vanity Fair, as well as exhibited at the Royal Academy, Tissot arrived with established social and artistic connections in London.

[16] Tissot's pre-war caricaturist work with Vanity Fair included contributions to Sovereigns,[15] a series lampooning various heads of state such as Napoleon III of France,[17] Alexander II of Russia,[18] or Wilhelm I of Germany,[19] depicting the latter two in particular as bloodthirsty conquerors.

Tissot would further explore political themes of turmoil in Europe during the onset and aftermath of the war: The 1870 painting La Partie Carrée evoked nostalgia for the period of the French Revolution while hinting at the hedonism of the contemporary French aristocracy in portraying a pair of young women picnicking with two men, one in revolutionary military garb,[4][20] while the c. 1873 work Still on Top depicted the allegorical ascension of the Austrian Habsburg and North German war flags over Europe - The title is thought to be an ironic jab at the British ensign barely visible at the top of the canvas.

[2] Tissot is considered a core figure of Japonisme alongside contemporaries such as Alfred Stevens and Claude Monet,[24] a widespread artistic movement formed in response to the sudden influx of Japanese art, textiles, and curiosities into the European market as a result of the forced opening of trade relations with Japan in 1853 and subsequent Meiji Restoration in 1868.

[2] 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][30][31] Many of his depictions of contemporary life include hints or narratives of desire, vulgarity, and the complexity of sexual relationships,[21] while his idiosyncratic focus on women's fashion and society made an idealized female beauty a widespread commonality of his portraiture.

Gallery of HMS 'Calcutta' (1876) was particularly noted for its use of body language and subtext in depicting a scandalous moment of flirtation between a married officer and a young woman, with the perspective heavily accentuating the latter's figure and sexuality.

[30][32] The work received criticism as "hard, vulgar, and banal" upon release,[33] and some scholars have even suggested Tissot's selection of the Calcutta for the painting's setting to be a deliberate play on the phrase "Quel cul tu as" ("What an arse you have" in French).

[36] Tissot's paintings and prints of 1877–1881 included images of travel along the Thames or south coast and to Paris, but many focused on Newton relaxing and reading in the garden, or surrounded by visiting children.

[2] The Shop Girl in particular seemed to return to Tissot's exploration of sexuality and gender, with one writer identifying depictions of desire and baseness in the composition, while the series's wider inclusion of working class women outside of the household as subjects could have been seen as morally dubious at the time.

[31] La Femme à Paris also solidified the influence of Japanese prints in Tissot's work, as he used unexpected angles and framing from that tradition to create a monumental context in the size of the canvases.

[24] After completing the Woman of Paris in 1885 Tissot experienced a religious vision at the Church of St. Sulpice, leading him to revive his Catholic faith and spend the remainder of his life making paintings about biblical events.

[39] Moving away from the Impressionists' and Post-Impressionists' intent to create art that reflected a changing, modern world,[40] Tissot returned to traditional, representational styles and narratives in his watercolors.

As part of this artistic effort Tissot traveled to the Middle East in 1886, 1889, and 1896 to make studies of its landscapes and cultures, which would come to distinguish his series from contemporary Biblical art through its "considerable archaeological exactitude"[39] in striving for accuracy rather than religious emotion.

In 1906, filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché used the Tissot Bible as the basis for The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ, her largest production at Gaumont to date featuring approximately three hundred extras over twenty-five total episodes.