Of Franco-Italian extraction, Charles Blanc was born in Castres, France, on the 15th of November, 1813.  When in 1830 he and his brother Louis, youths of eighteen and nineteen, came to Paris, their aged father, an ex-inspector of finance whose career had been ruined by the fall of Napoleon, was dependent on them for support.  Louis soon procured work on a newspaper; but Charles, whose ambition from his earliest years was to become a painter, spent his days in the Louvre, or wandering about Paris looking in the old-print-shop windows, and he thus learned much that he afterwards developed in his works.  As his brother’s position improved, he was enabled to study drawing with Delaroche and engraving with Calamatta.  His masters gave him but little encouragement, however, and he soon turned his thoughts to literature, his maiden effort being a description of the Brussels Salon of 1836 for his brother’s paper.

Exquisite sensitiveness and responsiveness to beauty eminently fitted Charles Blanc for the position of art critic, and gave a charm to his earliest writings.  He brought to his new task the technical knowledge of an artist, and a penetrating critical insight which, aided by study, ripened rapidly.  The evidence of talent afforded by his first art criticism induced Louis Blanc to confide to him successively the editorship of several provincial papers.  But Charles’s inclinations were toward the calm atmosphere of art; he was, and ever remained, indifferent to politics, and looked upon the fiery, active Louis with astonishment, even while catching his energy and ambition.  On his return to Paris he began a history of the ’French Painters of the Nineteenth Century,’ but one volume of which appeared; and the ’Painters of All Schools,’ completed in 1876.  Very little was then known of the lives of the painters.  By illustrating each biographical sketch with engravings of the artists’ pictures, Blanc met a long-felt want.  As the work was intended for the general reader, it was not overloaded with erudition:  but numerous anecdotes, combined with vivacity of style, aroused interest in painting and created a public for the more purely technical works which followed.  Though assisted by others in this undertaking, Blanc himself planned the method of treatment, and wrote the history of the Dutch and French schools; and the work justly retains his name.

The Socialists had taken a prominent part in the events of February, 1848, which led to the overthrow of Louis Philippe; and they yielded to the universal desire by appointing Charles Blanc Director of Fine Arts—­a position which he had prophesied to his friends several years before that he would one day fill.  When he assumed office, the position of artists was critical; as, owing to social convulsions, government and private orders had dwindled into insignificance.  Thanks to his energy, work was resumed on public monuments, and the greater part of the sum of 900,000 francs, voted by the National Assembly for the Champs de Mars