Jacques Emile Blanche

Young Woman with a Hat - Original lithograph

Born into a wealthy French family of eminent psychiatrists, Jacques-Émile Blanche grew up surrounded by literary and artistic influences. His father was an important collector of Impressionist paintings and was friends with (and often physician to) many of the great art world figures of 19th century Paris. Although he received some formal training from Henri Gervex (1852-1929), Jacques-Émile Blanche undoubtedly learned most from his early mentor Edouard Manet and his friends James Whistler, John Singer Sargeant, Giovanni Boldini, and James Tissot. During his long and successful career Blanche painted many street scenes of late Victorian London but became most famous as a portrait painter. Like his father, Blanche was a popular and gregarious character, and a close friend of just about every important figure in Belle Epoque Paris. He painted famous portraits of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Aubrey Beardsley, James Joyce, Colette, Edgar Degas, Claude Debussy, Henry James, Auguste Rodin, Thomas Hardy, John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, Jean Cocteau, Ida Rubinstein, Stéphane Mallarmé, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Valéry, Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence in addition to Royalty and just about every prominent society beauty of the Belle Epoque. Between 1881 and his death in 1945 Jacques-Émile Blanche exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Artistes, the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (of which he was founder member), and the Exposition Universelle of 1900, in London at the Royal Academy and the New English Arts Club, and at the Venice Biennale where he was awarded a gold medal. He also became a renowned master to numerous students during his time at the Académie Vitti, one of the first schools to accept female students, and subsequently at the Académie de La Palette. In the 1930 he was made a Commander of the Légion d’Honneur and five years later was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the most distinguished position any French artist could be offered by the state. Today, works by Blanche can be found in the collections of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Tate Britain in London among many others.