Portrait of Jacques-Emile
Blanche
John Singer Sargent -- American
painter
c. 1886
Musée des Beaux Arts
- Rouen (Normandy)
Oil on canvas
81.9 x 48.9 cm (32 1/4
x 19 1/4 in.)
Inscription u l: à
mon ami Blanche [1]
Inscription u r: John S
Sargent
Jpg: Friend of the JSS Gallery
From: Tate Gallery
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)
From: 1911 Encyclopedia
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)
From: Oscar Wilde - Standing Ovations
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)
Notes:
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
|
