Jacques-Emile Blanche was a painter, writer and art critic. 

He inhabited the fashionable, artistic worlds of both Paris and London and found considerable success as a portraitist.  Blanche’s grandfather and his father too, were eminent `aliénistes’, and Jacques, as he was known, grew up in the famous family clinic, `La Maison du Docteur Blanche’ which came to be housed in the handsome Hotel de Lamballe with its beautiful garden on the outskirts of Paris.  The family lived closely with their patients or `pensionnaires’ a great number of whom were artists and writers.  Emile, his father, was passionate about his work, devoted to his patients and, though not a collector by nature, he owned a large group of watercolours, many by Delacroix, which his artistic son was allowed to admire. 

Félicie, his mother, was a forceful, cultured but deeply anxious woman who, not surprisingly, became obsessively careful of Jacques after two of their children died in early childhood and a third, Jacques’s beloved brother Joseph, some few years later.   Jacques, then an only child, moved between the fascinatingly adult and rather lonely life of the clinic and the more convivial world of his cousin’s house in Dieppe. But with the outbreak of the Prussian war in 1870, he was sent to London with a nanny and governess.  Thus began an intense relation with the city where Blanche came to feel deeply at home. He absorbed English culture, and in later years affected an English accent, dressed only in tailor made London suits, was fascinated by the arcane social world of English country houses and eventually became a natural part of the London art scene.