JACQUES-EMILE BLANCHE | Portrait of doctor Meuriot's children (After the bath)

Meuriot Family;
Thence by descent to the present owners.

Painter and chronicler of the artistic, intellectual and fashionable worlds of the Belle Époque, Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942) didn’t draw his models solely from Parisian high society. There are in fact numerous portraits of members of the Blanche family and their friends. Blanche painted this portrait of the children of Dr Henri Meuriot (1874-1946) at their bath around 1913. Georges (1907-1992) is shown at the centre of the painting sitting on the knees of a maid. His younger sister, Colette (1909-1973), standing in the middle of the bathtub, exchanges a knowing look with a household employee. Georges and Colette were born of the marriage of Henri Meuriot and Marguerite Rodrigues-Henriques (1887-1965), for which Blanche had served as a witness. The Meuriot family was therefore very close to that of the painter. Henri Meuriot directed the nursing home founded in 1846 by the artist’s grandfather in the Hôtel de Lamballe in Passy, where the Meuriot family lived from 1872. This mental health clinic was first run by two generations of doctors from the Blanche family, followed by two generations of doctors from the Meuriot family. This work of 1913 is not the first of Blanche’s portraits of the family, as attested by Mademoiselle Meuriot on her pony (1889), in the collection of the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris (inv. PPP3598).

Frequent visitors to the country house occupied by Blanche and his wife since 1902 at Offranville during the summer season, the Meuriot children are probably depicted in the Offranville bathroom. ‘I am only a portraitist who relates what he sees’ (Propos de peintre II), the artist claimed. Eulogist of bourgeois life, Blanche captures an intimate moment in the daily life of two young children of the privileged classes. The accumulation of toiletries on the dressing table, the presence of the bathtub, which appeared in the homes of the wealthy at the turn of the century, and the presence of the maid all attest to the comfortable circumstances of the artist and his models. A descendant of two of the greatest alienists of the nineteenth century, both adherents of Pasteur’s theory of germs, it is scarcely surprising that Blanche dwells on a scene illustrating the historical progress in personal hygiene.

The palette of velvety yellows, greens and blues, the quiet atmosphere of the room and the liveliness of the painter’s touch all place the work at the edge of the influence of photography. The speed of execution, bordering on a sketch, and the unusual framing support this idea. The hypothesis that the painting might have been made after photographs must not be discarded in view of the large private collection of negatives of the two children at Offranville. The decorative simplicity of this detailed account of bourgeois life evokes the artist’s education, sustained by the painting of Degas, Renoir and Manet, and especially by that of the English school. Excelling particularly in portraiture, Blanche demonstrates yet again his mastery of physiognomy and his observational gifts. His ode to childish joy is tinged by all the psychological flavour of the penetrating gaze of young Georges in majesty in the foreground. Much more than a portrait throwing light upon the bonds of friendship between two families, the painting plunges us into the interiority of a youth whose insouciance, perpetuated by the shimmering setting, seems to be called into question by a single glance.

We are grateful to Jane Roberts who has kindly authenticated this work. The painting will be included in the catalogue raisonné currently in preparation, under no. 1443.