Antoine Blanchard was born in a small village near the banks of the Loire on the 15th November 1910.
Blanchard received his initial artistic training at the Beaux-Arts in Rennes, Brittany. He then moved to Paris in 1932 where he joined the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Like Édouard Cortès (1882–1969) and Eugène Galien-Laloue (1854–1941), Antoine Blanchard essentially painted Paris and the Parisians in 19th century style. The artist began painting Paris street scenes in the late 1950s, and like Cortès, often painted the Paris landmark many times, in different seasons. Blanchard was particularly fond of painting Paris in cloudy or rainy days, depicting bustling streets with bright storefronts reflecting on wet streets.
