The ‘Blanche’ rabbit

After last week’s hiatus, ‘Cocktails with a Curator’ from The Frick Collection has returned. In this episode, curator Xavier Salomon swigs on a Sake highball as he reflects on James McNeill Whistler’s exquisite portrait of Mrs Leyland. The Japanese drink connects with Whistler’s fascination with Japonisme, highlighted by the delicate almond blossoms in the painting. The discussion can be watched at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAVlWxw9wh8&list=PLNVeJpU2DHHR_0y_Zvgn3MgZQQFcFx2eI&index=2&t=0s

The National Gallery of Victoria has 52 works by Whistler in the collection. There is the occasional sketch (including Whistler’s rendering of Charles Samuel Keene which was featured in a recent post), but most of the works are engravings. Although there are no paintings, we recently enjoyed having ‘Whistler’s mother’ visit from the Musee D’Orsay before the elderly were kept in isolation.

Exploring Whistler, and his wide circle of friends, is like following the white rabbit in Alice and Wonderland. It was while I was doing this, that I came across Jacques-Émile Blanche – who I am calling the ‘Blanche rabbit’ as he crossed paths with Whistler a number of times.

Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861- 1942) was a very well-known, and very prolific, French artist whose art has largely faded from view. However, if you are familiar with the most famous portrait of Marcel Proust (a close friend of Blanche) you will know one of Blanche’s works.

Blanche was born in Paris to a well-to-do, cultured and successful medical family. His father was a ‘nerve specialist’ (either a neurologist or psychiatrist) who ran a fashionable clinic that treated wealthy patients. As a result, Blanche was pampered and indulged. When Bismarck was moving towards Paris in 1870, the nine-year-old Blanche was shipped off to the safety of London. While there, he studied piano under Charles Gounod  (another French refugee from the Franco-Prussian war) who was so impressed with Blanche’s ability he called him ‘little Mozart’. Blanche’s enduring interest in music is one way his life intersected with Whistler’s life.

Although intended for a career in diplomacy, Blanche’s interest was in art. In pursuing this he was largely self-taught after receiving some limited instruction from Henri Gervex, an École des Beaux-Arts trained painter who was a few years his senior. As Blanche moved freely between London and France, his style derived from Thomas Gainsborough, and from his peers and friends – in particular John Singer Sargent, James Tissot, and Édouard Manet.

In Paris, Blanche exhibited at the Salon from 1882 to 1889, at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts from1890 and in the first Salon des Indépendants. In England he showed works at the New English Art Club.

Blanche’s artistic ability allowed him to become the Director of the Académie de la Palette – a private progressive art school in Montparnasse – from 1902 to 1911. And, Blanche’s bilingualism attracted many students from England, North America and even Australia who were seeking exposure to the latest avant-garde tendencies. Alumni from the school included: Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, Duncan Grant, Henry Lamb and Rupert Bunny.

During the same period, Blanche taught at another Montparnasse art school run by a family of Italian artists – the Académie Vitti. Here Blanche’s peers were Paul Gaugin and Walter Sickert. This school was in competition with the Académie Carmen with which Whistler was affiliated.

Although he painted landscapes, still lifes and interior scenes, Blanche is best known for his stylish portraits. Over the years he painted many portraits of important literary, musical and society figures including: Andrè Gide, Aubrey Beardsley, George Moore, Igor Stravinsky, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, Nijinksy, Percy Grainger and Charles Conder. Blanche first met Conder in Paris, but they became friends in 1895 when they both spent the summer in Dieppe. The portrait of Conder, which was painted in his London house, captures Conder’s flamboyant character. Images of many of Blanche’s paintings can be found at: https://www.artrenewal.org/artists/jacques-emile-blanche/1153

Blanche regularly spent his summers at his family house in Dieppe, playing host to artist friends, and popularising the area as an artistic colony. Blanche first met Whistler around 1884 and was in correspondence with him throughout the 1880s. In 1885 Whistler visited Sickert who was staying with Blanche at the house in Dieppe. Over time Blanche would come to own a number of paintings by Whistler including his ‘portrait of Sickert’, ‘St Ives: The Beach’ and an early sketch for the Frick portrait of ‘Mrs Leyland’ which is now in the Harvard Art Museum collection.

Blanche has three works in the NGV collection. The most impressive, and described by Walter Sickert to Blanche as: ‘To my mind it is the best executed work that I have seen by you’, is ‘The pink rose’ which was exhibited in the New English Art Club in London in 1891. This painting of a young girl looking pensively at a pink flower in her lap has a number of similarities with Whistler’s paintings – including compostional structure, limited palette and tonal variations.

The young girl in the picture is Lucie Esnault, the youngest daughter of a locksmith in Auteuil where Blanche had his studio. Lucie often posed for Blanche between 1885 and 1893 and it is interesting to compare the gentle sensitive depiction in ‘The pink rose’ with other representations of her from around the same time.

As well as painting, Blanche also wrote extensively on art (and about himself). He contributed articles on Whistler to the ‘Renaissance Latine’ (1905), ‘Propos de peintre, de David à Degas’ (1919) – with an introduction by Proust, and ‘Portraits of a Lifetime’ (1937).

While Blanche was a successful and prolific artist he was also a dedicated ‘bon vivant’ While he reeled from Proust’s description of him as someone whose ‘sole ambition was to be a much sought-after man of the world ‘, by his own memoirs, his stories often compromise accuracy for entertainment and as Sickert said of him: ‘he is liable to twist things he hears or doesn’t hear into monstrous fibs’ – if it makes for a good story!

Why not sip on a pastis and enjoy imaging being part of Blanche’s milieu.