Jacques-Emile Blanche, 'Francis Poictevin', 1887

This portrait’s tall, slim proportions seem designed to match its subject’s thin, upright form. The thinness is enhanced by the collar and cuffs of the man’s shirt, which stand clear of the flesh and cast deep shadows onto his neck and wrists, as if it is too large. Otherwise, the form is completely black, with the jacket buttoned up to the neck, thus covering the shirt. The darkness of the clothing is complemented by short but untidy black hair, with tufts above the forehead and at the back of the head, and by a moustache that trails over a thin, straggly beard. The background is cropped in tight to the figure, with one elbow grazing the right edge of the canvas, and the fingers of the clasped hands cut off at the bottom. This pushes us close to the figure, as does the bold contrast of the dark form against the background, which is painted in an acrid greenish-yellow.

The sitter’s character comes across strongly. Although apparently relaxed, there is a sense of anxiety in the eyes and clasped hands. He is not entirely open, looking off to our left, rather than directly at us, suggesting that he could be deep in thought. However, there is no clue in the painted image as to who he is or what he does. At the bottom right corner of the painting, though, is a signature and date: ‘J E Blanche 87’. The following year, 1888, Jacques-Emile Blanche used the portrait as the basis of a lithograph, which was published as the frontispiece of a book written by the sitter, Francis Poictevin, a French symbolist writer, dandy and novelist.

It could be that the portrait was always intended as the model for a lithograph. Both the strong contrast between foreground and background and the bold silhouette of the figure would read well when printed in black and white. However, years later, in a letter of 26 January 1939, Blanche claimed that he had painted it for another artist, his friend Edgar Degas, who had hung it in his bedroom. Unfortunately, the two artists fell out in 1903 when Blanche’s Portrait of Degas (North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh) was reproduced in one of the most fashionable artistic journals of the day, The Studio, against Degas’ own wishes. It may be that he returned the portrait to Blanche then.

The use of a strong outline and bold, monochromatic planes of colour suggests that Japanese art may have influenced Blanche. Japanese woodblock prints had become very popular, and were collected by artists such as Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh. Indeed, Van Gogh would also make use of bold, yellow backgrounds, most famously in his Sunflowers, painted the year after Blanche’s portrait.