(b Auteuil, Paris, 1 Jan 1861; d Paris, 20 Sept 1942). 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 colouring 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 (1842-1934), 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; priv. col., see Post-Impressionism, exh. cat., London, RA, 1979-80, p. 46) 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 (?1890-95; London, F.A. Soc.).
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