Acquisition · Portrait of George Rodier (1861-1929) by Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861–1942)

Charles Edmond Georges Rodier, known as George Rodier, came from a wealthy, cultured background. The same age as Jacques-Émile Blanche, he had also embarked on an artistic career, exhibiting a number of drawings and watercolors at the Salon des artistes français between 1885 and 1888. A feeling of intimacy emanates from this portrait, painted in Dieppe in the summer of 1889. With his forefinger resting on his temple, Rodier appears pensive, even melancholy. Elegantly dressed in an ivory-and-gray striped suit, fashionable at the time for water sports. Unlike his friend, he did not persevere in painting. Until his death between the wars, he seems to have led an essentially social existence, belonging to a small group of notoriously homosexual men. Familiar with the salon of Madeleine Lemaire (1845 - 1928), like Jacques-Émile Blanche and Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922), he is said to have inspired the latter's character Legrandin in À la recherche du temps perdu.

This early work by Jacques-Émile Blanche adds to the fine collection of portraits by this artist housed at the Musée d'Orsay. The clarity of the palette and the fluidity of the brushwork testify to the influence of Manet's painting on Blanche in his early years. He also admired Whistler's art, as shown by the refined combination of a range of whites, grays and blacks with different shades of yellow. Summery and bathed in light, George Rodier's portrait offers a perfect counterpoint to the famous Portrait de Marcel Proust par Blanche: alongside the socialite ready to make his entrance at a Parisian soirée, here is the dandy vacationing on the Normandy coast - two characters typical of fin-de-siècle Tout-Paris and the Proustian universe.

Who was Jacques-Émile Blanche?            

Son of the famous alienist doctor Émile Blanche (1820 - 1893), the painter and writer Jacques-Émile Blanche was one of the great society portraitists of the Belle Époque. From an early age, he rubbed shoulders with leading figures from the artistic and literary worlds at the family home in Auteuil and at Dieppe, the Normandy seaside resort where the Blanche family owned a cottage. While still at school, his tutor, Edmond Maître (1840 - 1898), introduced him to Édouard Manet (1832 - 1883), Henri Fantin-Latour (1836 - 1904) and Claude Monet (1840 - 1926). In 1881, he joined the studio of Henri Gervex (1852 - 1929), benefited from the advice of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 - 1919) and met Edgar Degas (1834 - 1917) and James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 - 1903). His first models were members of his entourage. His frequentation of Parisian salons led to friendships with Marcel Proust, André Gide (1869 - 1951), Pierre Louÿs (1870 - 1925) and Maurice Barrès (1862 - 1923), whose portrait he painted in the early 1890s.