Portrait of George Rodier

In the summer of 1889 Blanche was at Dieppe, the Normandy resort where his family kept a house and much of fashionable Paris spent the season. There he painted George Rodier, a friend his own age from a wealthy family, who had artistic plans too. Between 1885 and 1888 Rodier showed drawings and watercolours at the Paris Salon, then gave it up for a largely social life.

The painter caught him on holiday, in an ivory-and-grey striped suit then in fashion for boating, a finger to his temple and a black cat with a red collar on his lap. He moved in the same salons as the young Marcel Proust and is said to have lent traits to Legrandin, the snob of In Search of Lost Time. In the lower corner, Blanche's dedication to his friend carries the place and year, Dieppe 1889.