Louis-Gabriel Blanchet was born in Versailles, the son of Gabriel Blanchet waiter of monsieur Blanchet, valet de chambre of King Louis XIV, le Roi Soleil. Scarce information exists about his early years in France and the early stages of his career until 1727, when he won second place in the prestigious Prix de Rome. In that same year, the first place was given to Pierre Subleyras; the two young artists travelled together to Rome where they arrived in the spring of 1728 and shared a flat in Palazzo Mancini, then the site of the Académie de France.

Blanchet and Subleyras were part of the ‘Génération de 1700’, the group of artists that would dominate the artistic scene in France in the first half of the eighteenth century and that also included François Boucher, Edmé Bouchardon, Charles-Joseph Natoire and Carl Van Loo.

Blanchet was pensionnaire at the Académie de France from his arrival in 1728 until 1733 and there he met fellow pensionnaire Edmé Bouchardon, who was resident at the Académie from 1723 until 1732. It was quite common at the Académie de France for students to use each other as models; there are several known examples of sculptors making busts of their painter-classmates, and the painters making portraits of the sculptors.

In the 1730s the two artists chose parted ways; Bouchardon returned to Paris where he became the favourite sculptor of Louis XV; for the Salon d’Hercule in Versailles he realised L'Amour se faisant un arc de la massue d'Hercule (Paris, Museé du Louvre), but arguably his most famous sculpture was the bronze equestrian portrait of Louis XV which was erected in the centre of Place de la Concorde and that was destroyed during the French Revolution.

Blanchet instead remained in Rome, where he spent all his working life, gaining the patronage of the Duc of Saint-Aignan who at that time was French Ambassador to the Holy See. In 1732, Blanchet painted a set of four overdoors with allegorical subjects for this same duke.

During his career Blanchet painted other historical and allegorical paintings, however his reputation was based primarily on his portrait paintings, mostly commissioned by British and French visitors to Rome on the Grand Tour. Blanchet served also as court portraitist of the Stuart family who lived in exile in Rome and one of his most famous painting is the Portrait of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (London, National Portrait Gallery, fig. 3). Another celebrated painting is Portrait of the painter Giovan Paolo Panini (private collection, fig. 4), where the sitter is portrayed with a fluency similar to the present painting. The elegant and soft style characterised by luminous colours gained Blanchet great renown and made him the preferred painter of British travellers to Rome before the rise of Pompeo Batoni.

Fig. 1. Edmé Bouchardon, Self-Portrait, The J. Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York.

Fig. 2 Edmé Bouchardon, Self-Portrait, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Fig. 3 Louis-Gabriel Blanchet, Portrait of Charles Edward Stuart, National Portrait Gallery, London