Jacques Blanchard
Pages:
1
(b Paris, 1 Oct 1600; d Paris, Nov 1638).
He trained with his maternal uncle Nicolas Bollery (c. 1550/60–1630) from 1613 to 1618. He then set off for Italy but stopped at Lyon to work in the studio of Horace Le Blanc. Le Blanc left for Paris in 1623, and Blanchard is known to have finished a number of his works left in Lyon, including perhaps the Virgin and Child with a Bishop and a Woman Holding a Baby (Lyon, St Denis). At the end of October 1624 he reached Rome in the company of his brother Jean Blanchard, remaining there until April or May 1626. He was then in Venice until 1628, when he returned to Lyon via Turin. All that is known of his work in Italy is the mention by Félibien and Perrault of scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses painted in Venice, and pictures of the Loves of Venus and Adonis executed for Charles-Emanuel I, Duke of Savoy, in Turin. Blanchard’s earliest surviving work, the Virgin with the Christ Child Giving the Keys to St Peter (Albi Cathedral), painted in Lyon in 1628, shows the influence of Bolognese painting in such details as the faces, but the work as a whole reveals his knowledge of 16th-century Venetian painters such as Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano: Perrault called him the ‘Titian of France’, and Félibien stated that the principal quality of his work was colour. Blanchard was to oscillate between these two tendencies—the Bolognese, cool in colour and polished in handling, and the Venetian, warm, sensuous and colouristic—throughout his career.
