Antoine Blanchard (1910-1988) French, Oil on Canvas "Notre Dame, Paris". Impressionist city street scene of Notre Dame, Paris. The Notre Dame Cathedral can be scene in the middle ground of the painting. The street is active with people walking along the sidewalk and the street, with a horse-drawn carriage and automobile. Signed in the lower left. Label verso from Frank J Oehlschlaeger Gallery in Sarasota, Florida with title and artist. Information on artist on the back as well.
Overall Size: 23 1/2 x 27 1/2 in. (2 inch thick)
Sight Size: 15 1/2 x 19 1/4 in.
Frank and Pat Oehlschlaeger had an art gallery on St. Armands Circle (Sarasota, Florida) that opened in 1962 and changed the art scene from provincial to national. For the first time there was a selection of work by nationally and internationally known artists. Oehlschlaeger also had local artists including Jon Corbino, Helen Sawyer, Jerry Farnsworth and Ben Stahl. The gallery dominated the Sarasota art scene until he retired in 1997.
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, Eduoard Cortes, Jean Beraud, and Luigi Loir, 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 were sold briskly to collectors. By the1960s, Blanchard paintings were bringing several hundred dollars in galleries. 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 what the dealers described as the École de Paris or “School of Paris” painters.
Born as Marcel Masson, Blanchard was the son of a furniture maker who lived in the scenic Loire Valley, south of Paris. Growing up following World War I, he was sent to the nearby city of Blois for artistic training, and then to Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Rennes where he received a classical art education.
Marcel Masson was married in 1939, as war clouds gathered on the French horizon. He was drafted for service in the French Army. 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.
Exactly when Marcel Masson adopted the pseudonym Antoine Blanchard is not known, 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.
Blanchard’s early work was clearly modeled after the paintings of Edouard Cortès, but he was always his own man and never a slavish copyist. These paintings were darker in palette than the later Blanchard paintings most American collectors have become familiar with, and his red and blue tones were often bolder than those of Cortès. Blanchard’s brushwork was painterly, but the buildings in the paintings were always well rendered, for he had an excellent command of composition and perspective.
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.
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.
