
Henri Ganier was a French magistrate, painter, poster artist and illustrator.
Henri Ganier-Tanconville was born in Lunéville (Meurthe-et-Moselle). After passing his baccalaureate, following the example of his three great uncles and his grandfather, an officer of the Empire, Henry Ganier decided to pursue a military career. His father steered him towards law and literature, and he became a student at the law faculty of Strasbourg, then a trainee lawyer in Colmar. During the Franco-German War, he enlisted as a lieutenant in the 2nd battalion of the Haut-Rhin mobile troops. After the defeat, his family settled in Tanconville, a small village near Cirey-sur-Vezouze, on the new border of 1870, whose name he then used as a pseudonym. He left Alsace in 1872 and became an examining magistrate in Nancy (1872-1893). He would remain marked by this forced exile, evoking in the foreword to his Récits et légendes d'Alsace (1884, Paris, Berger-Levrault) “regrets for the beloved land, Heimweh in a word”. In 1873, he married Thérèse Arnold, who bore him two sons, Frantz and André. His wife died in 1892.
He held several posts in the judiciary and was an examining magistrate in Nancy from 1872 to 1893. He ended his career in 1893 and devoted himself to painting. He moved to Strasbourg in 1894, where he lived until 1914. During this period he devoted himself exclusively to his work as a painter and illustrator under the pseudonym Tanconville. He is mentioned among the founding members of the circle of Alsatian painters of the Kunschthafe, whose twenty-seventh dinner he illustrated. For over thirty years, he produced posters for the Compagnie des chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée (PLM). His compositions often feature soldiers and women wearing Alsatian headdresses. From 1898 until his death, he edited Le Grand Messager Boiteux de Strasbourg, for which he wrote the preface and several articles.
Henri Ganier-Tanconville exhibited at the Strasbourg artists' salon in 1903 and 1904.
A specialist in military drawings and Napoleonic uniforms, Tanconville, a Francophile artist, was expelled from Alsace in 1914. During the First World War, he took refuge first in Geneva, then joined his eldest son in Chambéry and retired to Baume-les-Dames after the death of his son, who fell on the field of honor in 1917 with the rank of captain in the 140th Infantry Regiment. He died in this retreat in 1936.