Jacques Emile Blanche

JACQUES-EMILE BLANCHE Paris 1861 - 1942 Offranville Painter, novelist, collector and critic, Jacques-Emile Blanche was one of the most prominent members of the Anglo-French society of his day. It was as a portraitist of fashionable society that he established his reputation, and he frequently crossed the Channel in order to paint scenes of social genre. His memoirs, Portraits of a Lifetime (1937), describe his milieu with an eye for a good tale, if not always for the gospel truth. Blanche was born in Paris, the son of the fashionable psychiatrist Doctor Emile Blanche, whose house at Passy was visited by many illustrious writers, musicians and artists. Although Blanche studied briefly with Henri Gervex and Jacques-Fernand Humbert, it was Edouard Manet and John Singer Sargent who had the greatest influence on his artistic development. Blanche’s portraits include iconic images of his friends Marcel Proust (1892; private collection, Paris) and Aubrey Beardsley. Blanche spent much of his time in Dieppe, which became a meeting-point for French and English celebrities. Amongst his numerous friends were Manet, Degas, Renoir and Whistler, as well as Sickert, Conder and Beardsley. He also spent much time in England and became a member of the New English Art Club in 1887. He married Rose Lemoinne, the daughter of John Lemoinne, an old family acquaintance, and they lived at Offranville near Dieppe, where he executed the War Memorials in Offranville Church in 1919. A regular exhibitor at the Paris Salon from 1882-89, and from 1890 at the Societé Nationale, Blanche held his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris in 1914, and a retrospective exhibition took place at the Musee de l’Orangerie in 1943. Blanche was also a prolific writer and published many books, of which his most famous are Mes Modeles (1928), Portraits of a Lifetime 1870-1914 (1937) and More Portraits of a Lifetime 1918-1938 (1939).