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Lot 45*
Jacques Emile Blanche(French, 1861-1942)Henriette Chabot au piano
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Amended
24 September 2025, 14:00 BST
London, New Bond Street£150,000 - £250,000
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Jacques Emile Blanche (French, 1861-1942)
Henriette Chabot au piano
signed and dated 'J. E. Blanche 84' (lower right)
oil on canvas
146.9 x 112.4cm (57 13/16 x 44 1/4in).
signed and dated 'J. E. Blanche 84' (lower right)
oil on canvas
146.9 x 112.4cm (57 13/16 x 44 1/4in).
Footnotes
Provenance
The artist.
Georges Lecaron, the artist's cousin, acquired from the above upon his death.
By descent to Florence Lecaron, his daughter.
Private collection, USA, by descent from the above.
Exhibited
Paris, Salon, 1884, no. 249.
Paris, Hôtel Jean Charpentier, Peintures, pastels et lithographies de Jacques-Émile Blanche, 3 - 28 March 1924, no. 2.
Paris, Hôtel Jean Charpentier, Mes Modèles, Peintures, pastels et lithographies de Jacques-Émile Blanche, 2 - 26 May 1929. no. 5.
Paris, Galerie Pierre Colle, Jacques-Émile Blanche, 15 May - 1 June 1931, no. 5.
Paris, Musée de l'Orangerie, Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942), 1943, no. 6.
Literature
Jacques-Émile Blanche, La Pêche aux souvenirs, Paris, 1949, p. 155
Mireille Bialek, Jacques-Émile Blanche à Offranville, Musée Jacques-Émile Blanche, Offranville, 1997, p. 29, illustrated.
C. Pétry et al., Jacques-Émile Blanche, peintre (1861-1942), exh. cat., Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, 15 October 1997 - 15 February 1998, p. 78.
Jane Roberts, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Montreuil, 2012, pp. 39-40, illustrated.
Listed in the Jacques-Émile Blanche catalogue raisonné, under RM 47- Femmes.
Henriette Chabot au piano is more than simply a portrait; it opens a window into an intimate world of sophistication and erudition that reached its peak in fin de siècle Paris. The model is painted in the artist's own home, leaning against his own piano. The real subject of the painting is not the young Henriette, but music.
Born in Paris and raised in the fashionable suburb of Passy, Jacques-Émile Blanche was educated in an atmosphere of culture and refinement. He was the son of the celebrated psychiatrist Émile Antoine Blanche, who treated the elite of Paris, among them the poet Gerard de Nerval. From an early age, Blanche was exposed to the literary and artistic luminaries of late 19th century Paris, and he was comfortable in the company of famous artists, musicians, writers and socialites. He spent some time in the studio of Henri Gervex. and won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. He regularly exhibited at the Paris Salon and in London at the Grosvenor and Grafton galleries and was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor.
Blanche was himself a man of letters, and published several semi-autographical books which, like his paintings, give insight to the manners and mores of the social elite of the Belle Epoque. Doubtless, the artist drew upon his social and artistic interaction with the cream of Parisian and London society as a basis for his books, and his insight into the personalities of his subjects as an artist is clearly reflected in his writing.
Blanche was also a prodigious collector of his contemporaries' art. In the mid-1870s his parents hired Edmond Maitre (1840-1898) as his tutor, and in 1875, Maitre introduced the young artist to Edouard Manet. Maitre encouraged Blanche to purchase three paintings by Claude Monet along with works by Paul Cezanne, thus forming the basis for his personal art collection. Four years later, after Blanche passed the first part of his baccalaureate exam, Maitre took him to Manet's studio, intending to purchase La Chaumiere and introduced the young man to the artist. Blanche was deeply impressed by the time that he was able to spend with Manet, and was devastated by Manet's death in 1883; he made a point of purchasing a number of works from Manet's estate the following year.
Blanche was in enormous demand as a portraitist on both sides of the Channel. From 1884, he regularly travelled to England, sharing a flat in London with Giovanni Boldini and Paul-Cesar Helleu. Blanche would also have met Sargent in Paris, where his sitters included Jean Cocteau, Andre Gide, Edgar Degas, Claude Debussy and Colette among others. His English sitters were no less distinguished, among them James Joyce, Henry James, Aubrey Beardsley, Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.
During the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th, painting and the decorative arts adapted to the elegance and sophistication of the lives that were led by the wealthy. Much of the wealth derived from the expansion of industry in Europe at a time of great economic growth and even more came from the ever-increasing spending power of rich patrons of art from North America who themselves wanted to take back across the Atlantic a taste of the splendour that was Europe.
Of all the genres of art, the one which is the most reflective of this golden age is that of portraiture. The great artistic luminaries of this age were all portrait painters; John Singer Sargent, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Giovanni Baldini and Jacques Émile Blanche. This was the grand age, of portraiture and Paris and London were its epicentres. These portraits offer the modern viewer a glimpse into the Gilded Age, an age of glamorous women, dashing men and beautiful children, all depicted in opulent surroundings. This was also an age of astounding literary achievement and there was no better way to immortalize authors than through portraiture. Blanche painted several contemporary authors, and these portraits are executed with a great sensitivity.
The Belle Epoque was also an age of women. Women figure predominantly in the portraits by the major artists of the time, and it was a time of breakthrough for women writers, artists, actors and patrons of the arts. It was the time of Mary Cassatt, Edith Wharton and Isabella Stuart Gardner. The model in the present work is Henriette Chabot, the daughter of a bookseller. Blanche painted her several times, as he found her both strikingly beautiful and a compliant sitter. Blanche introduced Henriette to Manet, and she modelled for L'Amazone, which was intended to represent 'Summer' in his Four Seasons, but remained unfinished at the time of his death.
Painted in 1884, when Blanche was 23 years old, Henriette Chabot au piano has a fascinating and complete provenance. The painting remained in the possession of the artist until his death in 1942, and he regarded it as one of his personal favourites. The work then passed to Georges Lecaron (1988-1974) who was also a painter and a cousin to Blanche on his father's side. Lecaron also studied painting with Blanche as a young boy, and it was Blanche who encouraged his talent. Lecaron became a teacher at the Academie Julian in the 1960s, and also helped to organize the 1943 Jacques-Émile Blanche retrospective at the Musee d'Orangene. Upon Lecaron's death in 1974, the painting passed to his daughter, Florence Soulez-Lariviere. and has passed by descent to the present owner.
Henriette Chabot au piano features Henriette in a music room leaning on an ebony piano, a vase of blue hydrangeas, deep purple irises and other flowers by her side. The young woman looks dreamily off into the distance, as if contemplating the beauty of the music she has just heard. The composition pays homage to Blanche's love of music; the scores on the piano reflect the artist's own musical tastes - Schumann, Schubert and Blanche's personal favourite, Richard Wagner's Parsifal. The references to the richness of life in the Belle Epoque are clear in the abundance of the flowers, the desk and paintings on the wall in the background, and even in the dress worn by his model.
This is not the only time that Blanche painted Henriette in this dress, which is clearly an allusion to the importance of fashion at this time. The white chiffon dress, embellished with a ruffled bodice and embroidered with a black pattern which is repeated on the cuffs, collar and the lower part of the skirt, clearly provided the artist with a foil which augmented the colour harmonies that punctuate the composition. The dress was brought back from America in 1873, by Lucy Prevost-Paradol, daughter of the French ambassador to Washington and a part of the prestigious Halevy family.
Henriette also wears this dress in Blanche's homage to Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe (1863), La partie de tennis (1882); here she appears lying in the foreground, complete with a black hat; model and dress feature again in Blanche's haunting Jeune femme en blanc (1886). The attention to the details of the dress and fabric are reminiscent of the work of James Jacques Joseph Tissot.
Henriette Chabot au piano is painted with the fluidity of draughtsmanship and brushstroke that is so characteristic of the artist. By infusing the white dress with hints of the blues and lavenders that predominate in the palette of the composition, the work calls to mind the innovations of James McNeil Whistler. As in the work of the American artist, the figure in Henriette Chabot au piano is dematerialized and subsumed into the decorative elements and tonal harmonies of the painting, bringing the painted work of art mare into the sphere of music or poetry. With this coalescing of concrete subject and atmosphere, and the capturing of the inherent grace of this young woman, lost in contemplation of the music before her, Blanche suffuses the entire work with an elegance and delicacy of expression that places him among the foremost artists of his time.
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