He was French but he also lived and worked in London. Jacques-Émile Blanche’s father was a noted psychiatrist who ran a clinic where many of Blanche’s sitters were clients. He was a talented painter of much charm, and he was popular in his own era. He had no formal training.
He excelled at capturing his sitter’s personality; particularly apparent in his 1895 portrait of Aubrey Beardsley, whose novel, Under The Hill, Blanche wrote a preface.
Blanche spent summers at his family house in Dieppe, across the English Channel in France. Blanche and his artists friends, including John Singer Sargent, Edgar Degas, and Giovanni Boldini, helped make Dieppe a popular art colony.
Blanche’s closest connections were with Paris. He exhibited at the Salon from 1882 to 1889 and at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1890. He painted portraits of Sargent, composer Claude Debussy, dancer Vaclav Nijinsky, and writers James Joyce and Marcel Proust, whom he met at a fashionable salon in 1891. Blanche shows Proust as a young dandy. They became good friends; Proust helped Blanche with his writing and provided the preface to Propos de Peintre, a collection of essays by Blanche where he writes about many of the painters of his own era. Blanche was unhappy about Proust’s comment in the introduction that Blanche’s sole ambition was to be “… a much sought-after man of the world”; an odd comment from a gentleman who was a dilettante and a social climber, and whose own ambition as a writer was limited by a lack of self-discipline.
It was well known around Paris and London that Blanche was gay, but after the trials and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, he married Rose Lemoinne, the daughter of the publisher and editor of the influential Parisian newspaper Journal des Débats. Their marriage was never consummated. One of Blanches boyfriends was Spanish painter Rafael de Ochoa, of whom Blanche wrote that they shared the “same tendencies”.
Blanche died at his home in Normandy in 1942.
All pictures via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
