Artist     Jacques-Emile Blanche
Title      Greensleeves
Date      Early works
object    Painting
Media    oil
Size       98 x 80cm
Ref          992

This piece was a part of the RWA early collection

Other websites featuring this artist's work
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Greensleeves
Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942) was the son of an eminent French pathologist and was brought up at Passy in a house that once belonged to the Princesse de Lamballe. Its 18th century architectural elegance and refinement may have had a lasting influence on his work and choice of subjects. Although he worked in the studio of Henri Gervex and was closely associated with Manet and Degas, he is largely considered to be self-taught.

From the early 1880s he was a frequent visitor to London, where he spent some time working with Whistler and Sickert. He exhibited with the New English Art Club from 1887 and gained a formidable reputation as a portrait painter capable of creating great elegance and poise in his sitters, many of whom were drawn from the great families of the period, but also included key portraits of Marcel Proust, of the poet Pierre Louÿs, the Thaulow family, Aubrey Beardsley, Percy Grainger, and Yvette Guilbert. The painting in the RWA collection ‘Greensleeves’ is typical of Blanche’s assured style, a closely controlled tonal structure and a sensitive rendition of a young woman.

Blanche played a pivotal role in the assimilation of Oscar Wilde into the Parisien cultural milieu. He had first met Wilde in Paris in 1883, while Wilde was looking to establish himself in the French capital, after his celebrated tour of the USA. Blanche made a painting of a young woman reading Wilde's Poems, and became an important point of contact for Wilde, introducing him to Marcel Proust in 1891 and sharing many of his friends in the cultural firmament, including Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Sickert and John Rothenstein.

As a successful portrait painter of fashionable society, Blanche exhibited with the Société Nationals and won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. His work is in many European collections, with eight in the National Portrait Gallery, London including one of James Joyce painted in 1935 (NPG 3883).

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