“Un pied sur chaque côté de la Manche”: Jacques-Émile Blanche’s Pictorial representation of British Aristocracy

French painter and writer, Jacques-Emile Blanche had both talent and charm. He enjoyed a great vogue in his day and gained great success as a portraitist of fashionable society. He won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 held in Paris. The loose brushwork and subdued colouring of his portraits are reminiscent of Edouard Manet and English 18th-century artists, especially Thomas Gainsborough. His contacts in Britain and his hospitality at Dieppe – an important summer cultural centre in Normandy, visited by French and English artists and writers – made him a focus for Anglo-French cultural relations, described in his volumes of autobiography ("Mes modèles", Paris 1928; "Portraits of a Lifetime", London 1937 and "More Portraits of a Lifetime 1918-1938", London 1938). The paper highlights Blanche's artworks dedicated to the British aristocracy within the large corpus of his portraits.