The Gallery of H.M.S. 'Calcutta' (Portsmouth)

It depicts two ladies in fashionable clothing and a young naval lieutenant, standing on the quarter gallery at the stern of the Royal Navy warship HMS Calcutta.

He knew James McNeill Whistler and Edgar Degas, but turned away from Impressionism,[2] and made mainly portraits and genre paintings of the Victorian upper classes in a more polished academic style.

The Gallery is typical of Tissot's work, depicting his subjects with almost photographic realism, with an ambiguous narrative that hints at risqué behaviour among the wealthy classes approaching or transgressing boundaries of propriety.

Tissot's work depicts two women with a young man in a flirtatious situation, but with a dangerous sensual undercurrent of moral uncertainty.

Each woman is wearing a fashionable gauzy white dress decorated with bows and ribbons, with a tightly fitting bodice over a corset and full skirts below the hips.

One woman, in a dress decorated with yellow ribbons, is leaning over the railing of the ship's quarter gallery, turning her head away as she hides her face from the naval officer behind her fan.

[5] Tissot's elegant depictions of passing fashions in sophisticated London society, with their ambiguous undercurrents, were criticised as immoral and superficial.