French family of harpsichord and piano makers, active from the end of the 17th century to the middle of the 19th. A Nicolas Blanchet, master instrument maker, worked in Paris in the first half of the 17th century, but his relationship to the later family is unknown. The founder of the family firm was Nicolas Blanchet (b Reims, c1660; d Paris, 1731); it is not known where or to whom he was apprenticed, but he was in Paris at the rue des Fosses St Germain when he married in 1686. He was admitted to the guild as a master in 1689 and prospered during the next few years judging by his surviving instruments and guild position. In 1717 he moved to rue St Germain l’Auxerrois. His second son, François-Etienne Blanchet (i) (b Paris, c1700; d Paris, 1761), became a full partner with his father in 1722, and an inventory of the assets of the partnership taken in 1726 shows their wealth to have nearly tripled in four years.
In 1727 François-Etienne (i) married Elisabeth Gobin, who as part of her dowry had a share with her brothers and sisters in a large house in the rue de la Verrerie. Blanchet father and son moved there and set up shop ‘vis-à-vis la petite porte de S. Merry’, where the workshop of the Blanchets and later Taskin was to remain to the end of the century. Two children were born of the marriage: Elisabeth-Antoinette (b ?Paris, 1729; d ?Paris, 1815), who married Armand-Louis Couperin in 1752, and François-Etienne (ii) (b Paris, c1730; d Paris, 1766), who became his father’s partner and successor.
The Blanchet relationship with the court began in the 1740s with the building of a harpsichord for Mesdames à Fontevrault and with increased repair work sent by Christophe Chiquelier, keeper of the king’s instruments; during the 1750s the firm became ‘facteur des clavessins du Roi’. Although harpsichord making and rebuilding dominated the workshop’s activities until the 1790s, the firm was one of the first in Paris to make pianos, one of which was owned by the prominent Parisian harpsichordist Claude-Bénigne Balbastre in 1763. On the death of François-Etienne Blanchet (ii) in 1766, the workshop was taken over by his chief workman, Pascal Taskin. Blanchet’s infant son Armand-François-Nicolas (b Paris, 1763; d Paris, 1818) was brought up and trained by Taskin. Armand Blanchet wrote a Méthode abrégée pour accorder le clavecin et le piano (Paris, 1797–1800/R). His son Nicolas (ii) managed the workshop from 1818 and later entered into a partnership with Johannes Roller, a German piano maker active in Paris from about 1808. When Roller retired in 1851, he was replaced by Nicolas’s son P.A.C. Blanchet, who succeeded his father in 1855.
Inventories and guild records show the Blanchet shop to have been both financially and artistically successful from the beginning. An inventory taken at the death of François Couperin (1668–1733) lists his large harpsichord as by Blanchet, and instruments made by the firm were prized and commanded considerably higher prices than those of other Paris makers. (For a description of Blanchet harpsichords, see Harpsichord, §4(i).) The Blanchets were particularly renowned for their reworking of 17th-century Flemish instruments. During the first quarter of the century Nicolas Blanchet replaced keyboards and actions, but later the cases were enlarged to meet the needs of an increased range, and sometimes large harpsichords were made from small Ruckers singles or even from several old soundboards. The Dictionnaire portatif des arts et métiers (1767, ii, 7) states: ‘It is in the art of enlarging the harpsichords of Ruckers that the late Blanchet has succeeded incomparably well … a harpsichord of Ruckers or Couchet, skilfully cut and enlarged, with jacks, slides and keyboards of Blanchet, becomes today a very precious instrument’.
The firm built their first upright piano in 1827, and an improved model produced in 1830 was widely imitated by other makers; the high-quality small upright pianos in which the firm specialized were successfully exhibited at many international exhibitions.
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R.E.M. Harding: The Piano-Forte: its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Cambridge, 1933/R, 2/1978/R)
P.J. Hardouin: ‘Harpsichord Making in Paris: 18th Century’, GSJ, x (1957), 10–29
C. Samoyault-Verlet: Les facteurs de clavecins parisiens (Paris, 1966)
W.R. Dowd: ‘The Surviving Instruments of the Blanchet Workshop’, The Historical Harpsichord: a Monograph Series in Honor of Frank Hubbard, i, ed. H. Schott (Stuyvesant, NY, 1984), 17–107
A. Anselm: ‘Un clavecin singulier: Blanchet 1736’, Musique ancienne, xx (1985), 24–66
J. Koster: ‘Foreign Influences in Eighteenth-Century French Piano Making’, Early Keyboard Journal, xi (1993), 7–38
WILLIAM R. DOWD/JOHN KOSTER