Signed, this oil by Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861–1942) shows peonies in a blue and white porcelain vase. Published in J. Roberts, Jacques-Émile Blanche, Gourcuff Gradenigo, Paris, 2012, p.180 (illustrated).

Jacques-Émile Blanche deserves recognition as a prolific and gifted painter, a writer of distinction and, especially, as an invaluable representative of the 'Fin de siècle' in Paris and in London, which was his second home. He was rich, well connected and self-assured, and mixed in many circles, counting Marcel Proust, André Gide, Thomas Hardy and Jean Cocteau among his closest friends. As a writer and critic he found time to produce thirty volumes, hundreds of articles and nearly two thousand letters.

When he was fourteen, Blanche visited Manet's studio, and from that time onwards Manet was his idol; at the end of his life his own collection included twelve paintings by Manet alongside works by Renoir, Cézanne, Corot and Courbet. He also studied Chardin closely and was advised by Fantin-Latour at the outset of his career, which explains his particular delight and skill in painting flowers. This handsomely sized still life shows the artist's debt to both Manet and Chardin, its varying textures of glazed porcelain, peonies and teapot loosely painted with a deceptive simplicity born of long experience.

Collectors of Belle Époque French painting, the Manet-Chardin lineage, and Blanche's celebrated social and literary circle will find this a handsome, fully published example of his still-life practice.