John Dent Portrait of Michael Blanche

Michael Blanche is a lawyer, collector, patron of the arts and a board member of the Art Foundation of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. He is also director of Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, a passionate fly fisherman, has an extraordinary repertoire of jokes and is enormously sociable and gregarious.

This portrait (with the pose that Dent wanted following a few 'unsuccessful’ preliminary sketches) was painted after a Christie’s auction in Melbourne. To the right of Michael Blanche is a table and on it is part of John Dent’s catalogue from his recent retrospective at Castlemaine Art Gallery.