Jacques-Émile Blanche (1 Jan. 1861 – 20 Sept. 1942); French artist. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques-%C3%89mile_Blanche) French painter and writer. His father, a fashionable nerve specialist, owned a clinic where many of Blanche's sitters had been patients. As a painter he had both talent and charm, and he enjoyed a great vogue in his day. His work lacks originality and was much influenced by such contemporaries as James Tissot and John Singer Sargent. The loose brushwork and subdued coloring of his portraits are also reminiscent of Edouard Manet and English 18th-century artists, especially Thomas Gainsborough. Except for a few lessons with Henri Gervex and Ferdinand Humbert, he had no formal training, and many of his paintings have deteriorated because of poor technique. He worked best on a small scale, and some of his less ambitious oils and small sketches (e.g. Head of a Young Girl, 1885) are among his most appealing works. The few pastels he executed during the 1880s and 1890s are also of high quality, as exemplified by the dramatic portrait of the poet Georges de Porto-Riche. As much at home in England as in France, Blanche visited London every year from 1884 with great success. His chief patrons there were Mrs Saxton Noble and Violet Manners, Duchess of Rutland. Among the many portraits he painted of English sitters are those of Mrs Holland (1885; untraced) and the Saville Clark Sisters (c. 1890), both of which have a panache worthy of Sargent. His ability to capture a sitter's personality is particularly apparent in his portrait of Aubrey Beardsley (1895), for whose novel, Under the Hill, Blanche wrote the preface. He also painted the artist Charles Conder (1904), James Joyce (1934 and 1935), Violet Trefusis (1926) and Virginia Woolf (1927). Blanche regularly spent his summers at his family house in Dieppe, playing host to many of his artist friends, including Walter Sickert and... (http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jacques-emile-blanche-765) undefined

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