“Scheveningen Beach and The Kurhaus”

Scheveningen — the great beach resort outside The Hague, with its famous Kurhaus dominating the seafront and the wide North Sea beach stretching towards the water — is not the subject one immediately associates with Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861–1942). He was above all a painter of people: of Proust and Degas, of Beardsley and Debussy, of the fashionable intelligentsia of Paris and London who filed through his studio across half a century. Yet this panoramic canvas of 1930 shows another side of him entirely — the accomplished landscape painter at ease with a demanding subject, and finding in the Scheveningen beach something that genuinely interested him. The composition is ambitious. The great horizontal sweep of the beach fills the lower half of the canvas, scattered with bathers and figures that are indicated with the loose, confident brushwork that characterises all his best work — each person a few strokes of colour, placed with a painter's instinct for where the eye needs to rest. The Kurhaus and the seafront buildings occupy the middle distance with architectural precision, their solidity anchoring the composition against the expansive sky above. And that sky is the revelation of the painting — a great luminous mass of cream, pink and pale blue, handled with the broad, broken strokes of a painter who has absorbed the lessons of Manet and Sargent completely, its warmth and weight giving the whole canvas its atmosphere and its mood. Born in Paris in 1861 to a fashionable psychiatrist whose clinic on the heights of Montmartre received the most distinguished patients in France, Blanche grew up in a drawing room frequented by Berlioz, Corot and the leading literary figures of the age. Marcel Proust was one of his closest friends — Proust helped edit his writings and later immortalised him as the painter Elstir in À la recherche du temps perdu. He also knew Degas, Renoir, Whistler, Henry James and Gertrude Stein, painting portraits of James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Colette, Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina among many others. His work is held in the Musée d'Orsay, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.