Jacques-Émile Blanche

Jacques-Émile Blanche (French: [blɑ̃ʃ]; 1 January 1861 – 30 September 1942) was a French artist, largely self-taught, who became a successful portrait painter, working in London and Paris.

Early life

Portrait of Jacques-Émile Blanche, John Singer Sargent, c. 1886.

Blanche, an only child, was born in Paris in the 16eme. His father, whose name he shared, was a successful psychiatrist who ran a fashionable clinic on the heights of Montmartre, and he was brought up in the rich Parisian neighborhood of Passy in a house that had belonged to the Princesse de Lamballe. As he grew up, he encountered many remarkable artists. His father's drawing room was frequented by many of the Parisian celebrities in literature and the arts — including Jules Michelet, Charles Renouvier, Hector Berlioz, Camille Corot, Louis Français, and numerous others. At Dr. Blanche's house there were regular Saturday meetings devoted either to some artistic performance or to conversation about aesthetic or literary subjects. Some of Berlioz's Les Troyens was first sung by Anne Charton-Demeur for guests of Dr. Blanche.^[1]

Career

Although Blanche received some instruction in painting from Henri Gervex, he may be regarded as self-taught.^[2] He became a very successful portrait painter, with a style derived from 18th-century English painters such as Thomas Gainsborough as well as Édouard Manet and John Singer Sargent. He worked in London, where he spent time from 1870 on, as well as Paris, where he exhibited at the Salon and the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. One of his closest friends was Marcel Proust, who helped edit several of Blanche's publications. He also knew Henry James and is mentioned in Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.^[3] In Paris, at the Académie Vitti, he took a portraiture class with Canada’s first female battlefield artist Mary Riter Hamilton.

In 1902, Jacques-Émile Blanche took over the direction of the Académie de La Palette, where he would remain director until 1911.^[4]^[5] He taught at the Académie Vitti in 1903.^[6]

Among the painter's most famous works are portraits of his father, Marcel Proust (private collection, Paris), the poet Pierre Louÿs, the Thaulow family (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), Aubrey Beardsley (National Portrait Gallery, London), and Yvette Guilbert and the infamous beauty Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione whom his father had treated for mental illness. Others he painted included James Joyce, Julia Stephen, Edgar Degas, Claude Debussy, Auguste Rodin, Colette, Thomas Hardy, John Singer Sargent, Charles Conder, Percy Grainger, and Tamara Karsavina as Stravinsky's Firebird.

Personal life

Blanche was well known in Parisian society to be homosexual, though closeted. After the Oscar Wilde trials he married Rose Lemoinne, daughter of John Lemoinne the journalist, publisher and editor of the influential Parisian newspaper Journal des Débats. But the marriage was never consummated.^[7] One of his lovers may have been the Spanish painter Rafael de Ochoa, whom Blanche wrote shared the "same tendencies",^[8] and features with him in a self-portrait. Blanche died at his home in Offranville-en-Caux, Normandy, France on 30 September 1942.^[9]

He was buried at the 2nd section of Passy Cemetery.

Posterity

A street in Offranville and a street in Dieppe were named after him.

In Offranville, there is a museum located on the 2nd floor of the Maison du Parc du Colombier which brings together paintings, complete literary works, souvenirs, letters and photographs of the artist, his family and his works.

Published works

He was the author of the unreliable Portraits of a Lifetime: the late Victorian era: the Edwardian pageant: 1870–1914 (London: J.M. Dent, 1937) and More Portraits of a Lifetime, 1918–1938 (London: J.M. Dent, 1939), about which Walter Sickert said "he is liable to twist things he hears or doesn't into monstrous fibs".^[10]