(b Paris, 17 Jan 1830; d Paris, 2 May 1901). French painter. His uncle, the landscape painter Alexandre Desgoffe (1805-82), had studied under Ingres; this perhaps accounts for Blaise's decision to train under Ingres's pupil Hippolyte Flandrin. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts on 7 October 1852, apparently intending to study history painting. At his first Salon in 1854 he exhibited a genre painting, A Game of Cup and Ball in the Studio, a portrait and two studies of agate cups (all untraced). He is not otherwise known as a painter of genre subjects or portraits but regularly exhibited still-life compositions of precious objects painted on smooth panels with a heightened trompe l'oeil realism that was widely compared by critics with 17th-century Dutch still-life painting. He varied the pattern little. Most of his work in the 1860s seems to have been based on 16th-century objects in the Louvre. In the 1870s he added Chinese, Japanese and Greek items, probably on demand. The Vase of Rock Crystal and Other Objects (exh. Salon, 1874; New York, Met.) was commissioned from Desgoffe by Catharine Wolfe, who herself selected the items to be depicted from the Louvre. His sense of composition was rudimentary, but his virtuosity was much admired. Two paintings were bought for the Musée du Luxembourg in 1859 and in 1863 (now in Arras, Mus. B.-A., and Angouléme, Mus. Mun.), but by the mid-1870s his meticulous style was going out of fashion. He won a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 and continued to exhibit at the Société des Artistes Français until his death.
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