French painter Jacques-Émile Blanche was BOTD in 1861. Born in Paris to a prosperous bourgeois family, his father was a renowned nerve specialist and art collector. Blanche grew up in luxury, meeting his father’s celebrity friends including George Sand, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Hector Berlioz and Camille Corot. Apart from a few lessons with artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Blanche was largely self-taught. He became a successful portraitist, painting many of the leading cultural figures of his age, including Marcel Proust, Claude Debussy, Anna de Noailles, Vaslav Nijinsky, Tamara Karsavina, Jean Cocteau, Aubrey Beardsley, James Joyce, Violet Trefusis, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. A prominent member of Paris high society, he attracted the patronage of Robert de Montesquiou until a quarrel ended their friendship, and befriended Gertrude Stein, who mentioned him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Proust also became a close friend, proofreading his monographs and writing an introduction to a collection of Blanche’s essays about historical painters (describing Blanche, cruelly but accurately, as one whose “sole ambition was to be a much sought-after man of the world”). Blanche visited London every year, developing a lucrative client base of rich society ladies, and befriended Oscar Wilde. He spent his summers at Dieppe, playing host to his artist friends including John Singer Sargent (with whom his work was often unfavourably compared), James Whistler and Walter Sickert. In 1902, he became the director of the Académie de La Palette and taught painting at the Académie Vitti. In 1895, two months after Wilde’s imprisonment for gross indecency, Blanche married his childhood friend Rose Limmoine, largely to deflect scrutiny about his homosexuality. The marriage was unconsummated, and Blanche pursued affairs with men, including the Spanish painter Rafael de Ochoa. In the 1930s, Blanche was made a Commander of the Legion d’Honneur and elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He died in 1942, aged 81.