Les Grand Boulevards: The Life of Antoine Blanchard

Antoine Blanchard (1910-1988) Place de la Madeleine

Antoine Blanchard

Looking Back at Fin de Siècle Paris

(1910 – 1988)

by Jeffrey Morseburg

Antoine Blanchard (c.1910-1988) was a prolific and successful Neo-Impressionist painter who specialized in nostalgic scenes of Fin de Siècle Paris.  Inspired by the subjects as well as the success of earlier painters of Parisian life like E. Galien Laloue (1854-1941), Eduard Cortes (1882-1969), Jean Béraud (1849-1935) and Luigi Loir (1845-1916), Blanchard painted hundreds of views of the “City of Light.” In the late 1950s, his street scenes were exported to the United States and the United Kingdom, where they sold briskly to collectors. By the1960s, Blanchard paintings were bringing several hundred dollars in galleries, so they were not inexpensive, but were attractive to collectors who loved Parisian scenes but who could not afford the works of Cortes or one of the other French painters known for their views of Paris in Belle Époque. Eventually Blanchard’s more delicate, feathery pastel-toned scenes of rain-swept Paris became sought after in their own right and, when he died, he was considered the last of the Ecole de Paris or “School of Paris” painters.

Antoine Blanchard – "Place de la Republique"

The Early Life of Marcel Masson né Antoine Blanchard

The most salient fact about the life and career of the painter Antoine Blanchard was that he was actually born Marcel Masson, the son of a furniture maker who lived in the scenic Loire Valley, south of Paris, where the French nobility had their chateaus. The date that is usually given for Blanchard’s birth is November 15, 1910, but some of the facts of his life have always been clouded by early biographies that claimed even earlier dates for his birth, probably so that he would seem to be seen as a contemporary of the famous Belle Epoch painters rather than a follower. Blanchard grew up in the hardscrabble years following the First World War. Because he was artistically talented, he was sent first to the nearby city of Blois, the capital of the Loire-et-Cher Département, for artistic training and then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, on the Brittany peninsula, where he received a classical art education. By some accounts Blanchard also studied in Paris, where the historic École des Beaux-Arts is located, but the depth of his study and the style of his earliest work will require further research.

Marcel Masson was married in 1939, as war clouds gathered on the French horizon. He was drafted for service in the French Army and participated in the short and futile struggle against the invading German Panzers before returning to his family and his art during the Nazi occupation. A daughter, Nicole, was born in 1944 with a second daughter, Eveline, who eventually came to the United States, following in 1946.  Masson’s early art career was interrupted, first by World War II and later by the necessity of keeping his father’s workshop running in the years after his death. By the late 1940s, though, Masson returned to his art and moved to Paris in order to further his career.

Antoine Blanchard – "Notre Dame dans la Pluie", 13" x 18"

The Birth of Antoine Blanchard, Painter of la ville des lumières

Exactly when Marcel Masson adopted the pseudonym Antoine Blanchard is not known, nor are we aware of his motivations for adopting a nom de plume, but the practice was not unusual for French painters. In most cases a pseudonym was adopted because the artist had contractual obligations with more than one agent or dealer. Another motivation could be to obscure the scope of a sizable artistic production. Or, like many painters before him Masson may have initially painted different subjects under different names. Marcel Masson né Blanchard would have been well aware that the famous and prolific French painter E. Galien Laloue painted under no less than four names – three pseudonyms in addition to name he was christened with – and so the adoption of another name was probably not seen as a liability to him.

Antoine Blanchard – “Place de la Concorde”, 13″ x 18″

In any event, by the 1950s Marcel Masson had become Antoine Blanchard, a painter of Paris. With the aging Edouard Cortes as a model, Blanchard began to specialize in scenes of la ville des lumières, or the “City of Light.”  However, instead of painting contemporary Paris, the crowded metropolis of his own time, which he may have felt was lacking in romance, he chose to look at the French capital through the rear-view mirror. So Blanchard became known for his depictions of the hurly-burly life of Belle Epoch Paris. For inspiration, he is said to have collected old sepia-toned postcards of life in La Belle Époque (“The Beautiul Era”), the long period of peace and relative prosperity between the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the start of the First World War. In addition, however, the paintings of Loir, Baraud, Laloue and Cortes could be found and studied in the flea markets of Paris as well as the auctions at the l’Hôtel Drouot.  Reminders of the Belle Epoch were thus all around Blanchard, and of course the architecture that he painted had survived the war intact. Soon he was painting the horse-drawn omnibuses that took turn-of-the-century Parisians on longer trips throughout the city as well as the tradesmen, children and fashionably dressed ladies that populated Baron Haussmann’s Les Grand Boulevards.

Antoine Blanchard Reaches Artistic Maturity

Blanchard’s early work was clearly modeled after the paintings of Edouard Cortes, but he was always his own man and never a slavish copyist. These paintings were darker in palette than the Blanchard paintings most American collectors have become familiar with and and his red and blue tones were often bolder than those of Cortes. He never adopted the heavy “impasto,” the build-up of paint on the highlights of Cortes’ work, leaving that artistic trademark to the master.  Blanchard’s brushwork was painterly, but the buildings in the paintings were always well-rendered, for he had an excellent command of perspective.

In the late 1950s, agents began to purchase Blanchard’s paintings and then to export them to the United States, selling them to commercial galleries in far away Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York.  By 1965, his work was already well known enough to be in reproduced by print publishers. By the end of the 1960s, Blanchard had began to develop his own mature style by employing a lighter, brighter, palette and a deft, almost calligraphic style of brushwork.  This helped him step out of Cortes’ shadow and become a sought-after painter in his own right.

Blanchard worked through agents, essentially brokers, who purchased his work and created a demand for it in the United States and Canada. The vast majority of his paintings were smaller works, which were sent to the United States in tubes and stretched and framed here by the galleries that sold them. Virtually all of these Blanchards were European sizes, roughly 13” x 18” or 18” x 21 1/2″, but on rare occasion he painted much larger works in American sizes – such as 24” x 36” – on commission for dealers like my father, Howard Morseburg.

Fakes, Forgeries and Faux-Blanchards

Once Blanchard’s work was selling briskly through galleries and retailing for several hundred dollars, other painters – who may have been getting for ten or twenty dollars for their paintings when they sold – took notice and began to imitate his work. These works were painted abroad, purchased by agents and then sent to lesser galleries, furniture stores and frame shops in the United States where they were sold for a fraction of what an authentic Blanchard sole for. Thus few people were fooled at the time. These were also painted in standard American sizes, which makes them stand out from the real Blanchards.  However, now these faux-Blanchards are more than forty years old and have the patina of age to obscure their less-than-immaculate conception. There are now hundreds of these Blanchard copies on the market and the artist’s failure to adopt some form of French trademark for his chosen nom de plume has made life difficult for the less experienced dealer or collector.

Blanchard’s Late Work

By the 1970s Blanchard’s paintings were being sold by galleries across the United States, and the American market absorbed virtually all of his work. In 1969, with the passing of Edouard Cortes, he became the last of the long series of prolific French painters of Parisian life. Blanchard’s later works were usually daylight scenes, with Paris seen awash in rain or with a mantle of soft snow, and so collectors no longer confused him with Cortes, whose Parisian clock seemed to always be set at twilight. These paintings were rendered in softer, pastel tones and he used his brush with a light touch. These qualities gave Blanchard’s work of the 1970s and 1980s a lighter, more decorative appearance.

In the late 1970s, the French agent Paule Larde published a lavish book that was claimed to be an authorized biography of Antoine Blanchard, by his exclusive dealer. Today, this book is almost impossible to find and if my memory is accurate, this is because the book was the subject of a lawsuit in France.  At the time we were told that it was because some of the information in the Larde book was contested and found inaccurate and so it was apparently withdrawn from publication. One claim that Larde made was that Blanchard’s production was extremely limited, but while he was not as prolific as Cortes or Laloue, he was a hard-working painter who managed to supply a long list of galleries with his work. At one time, we had a copy of the Larde book in our family library, but I haven’t been able to locate it in recent years, to compare its contents to later and probably more accurate information. When the motivation for a monograph is marketing rather than art history, accurate and important details can be swept aside by exaggeration hyperbole and claims of exclusivity that were meant to discourage collectors or galleries from buying Blanchard’s from other representatives.

The details of Antoine Blanchard’s life are not well known because he never sought the limelight. He was content to work in his studio and ship his paintings to his agents who sold them abroad. Eventually both his daughters – Nicole and Evelyn – followed in his footsteps and became painters themselves. Eveline (1946-2008) was savvy enough to adopt the Blanchard nom de plume and she began painting street scenes that closely resembled her father’s later work. Antoine Blanchard passed away in 1988, leaving hundreds of paintings of Belle Époque Paris – the Notre Dame Cathedral, the Opera, the Arc de Triomphe and Place Concorde – as his lasting legacy. Copyright 2010-2011, Jeffrey Morseburg, not to be reproduced without author’s specific written permission.

About the Author: Jeffrey Morseburg is a curator, appraiser, archivist, writer, researcher and dealer in American and French art. He has written extensively on 19th and 20th century art.  He grew in the art business and, as a young man, he stretched and framed Blanchard paintings as they arrived from Europe in mailing tubes.  Today, he assists collectors with authentications, appraisals and the sales of works by Antoine Blanchard and other French painters like Edouard Cortes, E. Galien La Loue and Luigi Loir as well as many other artists. If you need assistance – an authentication or appraisal – please e-mail images of the front, back and signature of the painting in question to jeffreymorseburg@yahoo.com