Blanche Lavallée, 1916
Artist: Matthews, Richard George (1870 - after 1919)
Medium: coloured chalk on paper
Dimensions: 56.8 x 40.6 cm (sheet)

Blanche Lavalée (born 1891) was one of over three thousand women who served as nurses in the Canadian Army Medical Corps during the First World War. She enlisted in March 1915, at Montreal, and served primarily at the Canadian military hospital at Saint-Cloud outside Paris. In this sensitive and rather sensuous portrait she wears the starched veil and blue uniform that earned the nurses the nickname of bluebirds. The artist also served in the Medical Corps, but in civilian life specialized in society portraits and magazine illustration,making his career in England.

National Archives of Canada, negative no. C-017368