Authors' Artist

PORTRAITS OF A LIFETIME -- Jacques-Emile Blanche--Coward-McCann ($4).

In contemporary literary reminiscences, Portrait-Painter Jacques-Emile Blanche pops in & out like some old friend who has been around for so long that nobody thinks to introduce him. As a result he has the unjustified obscurity of an oldster who is generally thought to have been dead a long time. He is in Mabel Dodge Luhan's memoirs and Arnold Bennett's diary. He knew Whistler, Degas, Cezanne, Rodin and Harold Nicolson. Henry James was his friend, as was Mallarme, Thomas Hardy and King Edward VII. Blanche knew the originals of most of Proust's characters, and Proust wrote an introduction to one of his books. Although he has known almost every prominent French and English writer since the days of Turgenev (and has painted portraits of most of them), Jacques-Emile Blanche has figured passingly rather than prominently in their writings. Last week readers of his rambling memoirs found what they might have expected--that he figures only passingly in his own autobiography, while his acquaintances are very prominent in it.

Because Painter Blanche has covered whole epochs in his previous writing, and does not want to go over the same ground in this, he does not follow a strict chronological narrative in Portraits of a Lifetime, but skips through time & space as his memory prompts him. The result is a little disconcerting to readers who do not know his previous volumes. At one moment the artist may be telling some antique anecdote about Renoir which drifts imperceptibly into comment about the political situation in present-day France, of which he strongly disapproves.

Blanche knew everybody. He was at Dieppe when it was a favorite spot for poets and painters and when Edward VII, as Prince of Wales, paid regular visits incognito (with the whole town informed) to the villa of the Duchess Caracciolo. Later on Blanche knew the great houses of London, and pays an eloquent tribute to Mary Hunter, whose wit and beauty inspired Henry James, George Moore, Rodin, Sargent and himself. One of his stories about her gives the slightly archaic flavor of his worldly revelations, which sound like something out of Proust. When Rodin was working on a bust of Mary Hunter he praised her beauty, kissed her hand "a little too greedily." When she told Blanche of Rodin's excitement when they were alone in his studio, "I reminded her," he says, "of J. Dominique Ingres' frenzy in the presence of Comtesse d'Haussonville." It appears that when Ingres was painting the Comtesse he found it necessary to rearrange the folds of her dress, asked permission to touch her and, when it was granted, fell weeping at her feet. "Mr. Sargent is less lascivious," said Mary.

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