Jacques-Émile Blanche Biography

Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942) was a French artist, largely self-taught, who became a successful portrait painter, working in London and Paris.

Blanche, an only child, was born in Paris in the 16th arrondissement and received his education at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet. 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 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. 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.

Although Blanche 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. He worked in London, where he spent time from 1870 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, Jacques-Émile 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.

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. The marriage was never consummated. One of his lovers may have been the Spanish painter Rafael de Ochoa, whom Blanche wrote shared the "same tendencies", and features with 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.