Jacques-Émile Blanche NEAC (1 January 1861 – 30 September 1942) was a largely self-taught French artist who became a successful portrait painter, working in both London and Paris. He had ties to the French Impressionists, including Edgar Degas, whose portrait he painted, moving in avant-garde circles and drawing influence from contemporary French painting styles.He was elected to the NEAC in 1889.

Early life

Blanche, an only child, was born in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. His father Émile was a successful psychiatrist who ran a fashionable clinic on the heights of Montmartre, and he was brought up in the rich Parisian neighbourhood 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. There were regular Saturday meetings devoted either to some artistic performance or to conversation about aesthetic or literary subjects.

 

Education

Blanche was educated at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet, a secondary school in Paris. Although he received some instruction in painting from Henri Gervex and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he may be regarded as self-taught. He became a 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.

 

CAREER

He worked in London, and was a member of the New English Art Club (NEAC). In Paris, 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. In Paris, at the Académie Vitti, he took a portraiture class with Canada’s first female battlefield artist, Mary Riter Hamilton. In 1902, Blanche took over the direction of the Académie de La Palette, where he would remain director until 1911. He taught at the Académie Vitti in 1903.

 

Among the painter's most famous works are portraits of his father Émile Blanche, Marcel Proust (private collection, Paris), the poet Pierre Louÿs, the Thaulow family (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), Aubrey Beardsley (National Portrait Gallery, London), Yvette Guilbert, and Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione. 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 KarsavinaTamara Karsavina as the Firebird in Stravinsky’s ballet.

 

Personal life

Blanche was known in Parisian society to be homosexual, though he remained discreet about his orientation. 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.

 

One of his lovers may have been the Spanish painter Rafael de Ochoa, who, Blanche wrote, shared the ‘same tendencies’ and appears alongside him in a self-portrait. Blanche died at his home in Offranville-en-Caux, Normandy, France, on 30 September 1942. He was buried in the 2nd section of Passy Cemetery.

 

Posterity

Streets in Offranville and Dieppe were named after Blanche. In Offranville, there is a museum located in the Maison du Parc du Colombier, bringing together paintings, complete literary works, souvenirs, letters and photographs of the artist, his family and his works. Blanche made a generous bequest of his own paintings and those he had collected to the nearby Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen.

 

Exhibitions

As well as showing his work regularly with the NEAC, Blanche exhibited at The Paris Salon from 1882 to 1889 and The Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1890. He also exhibited in venues across Europe and North America, including New York, Brussels, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Chicago, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Rome, Madrid, and Saint Petersburg.

 


Memberships

In addition to the NEAC, Blanche was also a member of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in France and exhibited with the Belgian independent group Les XX. He was also allied with the group Trente-trois, which exhibited regularly at the Galerie Georges Petit, and was a member of the Société des Pastellistes.

 


Published works

He was the author of 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). His writing is considered somewhat unreliable, reading more like lively society gossip than carefully sourced autobiography. Known for his flair for anecdote, he often exaggerated, misremembered, or romanticised events. Walter Sickert remarked that “he is liable to twist things he hears or doesn’t into monstrous fibs.”

 


Selected Collections

  • Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France
  • Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia
  • Art Institute of Chicago, USA
  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, USA
  • Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
  • Government Art Collection, UK
  • Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries, UK
  • Manchester Art Gallery, UK
  • National Gallery, London
  • National Portrait Gallery, London
  • National Trust for Scotland, Brodie Castle, UK
  • New College, University of Oxford, UK
  • Southampton City Art Gallery, UK
  • The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK
  • University College, University of Oxford, UK
  • York Art Gallery, UK
  • Tate, London

 

Acknowledgements and further reading