(c) 2017 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Valentin A. Blacque

French, 1850 or 1851 - 1915

BiographyValentine A. Blacque papers
1882-1897
Valentine Alexander Blacque was a businessman and author. Collection consists of letters from illustrators, literary friends and others, relating to Blacque's books. Correspondents include Edwin A. Abbey, Austin Dobson, Kate Greenaway, William Henry Huntington, Frederick Locker-Lampson, Howard Pyle, Linley Sanborne, Edmund C. Stedman, and Octave Uzanne. Also, photographs, sketches and printed matter.
http://archives.nypl.org/mss/311; accessed 5/20/2021

VALENTINE ALEXANDER BLACQUE (Paris 1850 or 1851-1915), stockbroker, New York. Drawings and prints.

Valentine (or Valentin) Blacque, also called Vale or Vally Blacque, is the son of Édouard Edme Jean Blacque (or Blacque-Bey) and the American Olivia Mott, who married in 1850 in Paris. This is where his mother died in 1855. His father later worked as a Turkish diplomat in Washington.
Valentine Blacque attended Columbia College, then studied at Columbia University (Bachelor of Arts, 1871). In 1874, he married Kate Wilson Read and worked as a stockbroker for the firm WH Goadby & Co.
After his retirement, Valentine Blacque and his wife would have settled in Paris. American volunteer for the American ambulance in Neuilly during the First World War, Valentine is said to have died on January 9, 1915 in France.
Blacque has managed to bring together a very diverse collection of Asian art objects, textiles, cases and snuffboxes, paintings, miniature portraits, prints, drawings and books finally. Some of her works of art, including snuffboxes and textiles, can be found today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York thanks to donations and bequests Kate Read Blacque made in the years 1933, 1937, 1938, and 1948 in memory of her husband. Kate died in Paris in 1937.
From 1933 to 1934, a textile exhibition was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the title 'Valentine A. Blacque Collection of Textiles & Mabel Metcalf Fahnestock Collection of Laces'.
The important library that our collector had assembled was in part acquired by Henry W. Poor ( Catalog of the 'VAB' Collection In the Library of Henry W. Poor , New York 1903; GD Smith, 'Great auctions of the past. The Henry W. Poor Auction, Part two ', The Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies , XIII, 2, 2009, pp. 7-9). Let us add that Blacque was a member of the Book Fellow's Club of New York, a small group of bibliophiles, and that he seems to be at the initiative of the publication of the book London Lyrics(1883) by the poet Frederick Locker-Lampson (see correspondence in the Grolier Club Library, New York).
Blacque also produced bindings himself ( The New York Times , March 18, 1906, p. 37) and collaborated on Florence Cole Quinby's publication The equestrian monuments of the world , New York 1913.
We know little about his collection of prints and drawings. In 1942, at least twenty-nine prints from his estate entered the New York Public Library, donated by his widow. They carry one of Blacque's collection marks. These are prints by Dürer, Hans Sebald Beham, Rembrandt, in a mezzotint by Jean-Baptiste André Gautier d'Agoty and a drawing by Whistler. The library also keeps letters, manuscripts and documents concerning him (Manuscripts and Archives Division, MssColl 311).
Blacque seems to have used two marks: the one described here with his initials VAB in a rounded rectangle, and another, larger, the initials being separated by a point VAB, in a rectangle, and stamped in purple (L.4760).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
The University Magazine , 7, 1892, sv Valentine A. Blacque, p. 300 (with a photographed portrait).
Biographical Directory of the State of New York , 1900, sv Blacque, Valentine A., pp. 37-38.
F. Little and J. Goldsmith Phillips, 'Recent Gifts of Textiles: A Special Exhibition', The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin , 28, 12, 1933, pp. 205-212.
F. Dennis, 'Eighteenth-Century Boxes and Étuis in the Blacque Bequest', The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin , 33, 8, 1938, pp. 174-176.
http://www.marquesdecollections.fr/detail.cfm/marque/12274

Person TypeIndividual

Last Updated8/7/24

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