Blanche [1861-1942] is best known for his portraits of eminent writers, artists and musicians. He lived near Dieppe and made frequent visits to England, where he was a well-known figure in artistic and society circles. . .
(From the display caption August 1993)
(Tate Gallery)
BLANCHE, JACQUES EMILE (1861 ), French painter, was born in Paris. He enjoyed an excellent cosmopolitan education, and was brought up at Passy in a house once belonging to the princesse de Lamballe, which still retained the atmosphere of 18th-century elegance and refinement and influenced his taste and work. Although he received some instruction in painting from Gervex, he may be regarded as self-taught. He acquired a great reputation as a portrait painter; his art is derived from French and English sources, refined, sometimes super-elegant, but full of character. Among his chief works are his portraits of his father, of Pierre Lou3~s, the Thaulow family, Aubrey Beardsley and Yvette Guilbert.
(1911 Encyclopedia)
Jacques-Emile Blanche
Born in Paris, Blanche was the son of an eminent pathologist. He trained under Henri Gervex and was closely associated with Manet and Degas. From the early 1880s Blanche had been a frequent visitor to London, where he spent a formative period working closely with Whistler and Sickert, and exhibiting with the New English Art Club from 1887. During the 1890s he became a successful portrait painter of fashionable society, exhibiting with the Société Nationals and winning a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. Blanche first met Wilde in Paris in 1883, while Wilde was trying to gain a footing in the French capital, after his tour of America. He became one of the first admirers of Wilde in the Parisian artistic circle and produced a painting of a young woman reading Wilde's Poems (location unknown). Blanche was an important Parisian contact for Wilde, through whom he met Marcel Proust in 1891. Wilde and Blanche shared many friends, including Beardsley, Conder, Sickert and Rothenstein.
(Oscar Wilde - Standing Ovations)
Special thanks to Madeleine Bruchet, from Dinard originally now in Rennes, France, a friend of the JSS Gallery, for sending the image of this painting
1) Translation
à mon ami Blanche
To my friend Blanche