BOUDIN.THE PORT OF TROUVILLE.
(By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright.)

The ready master-worker of this plain and sincere naturalism in portrait painting was peculiarly Fantin-Latour, who ought not merely to be judged by his latest paintings, which have something petrified, rigid, gloomy, and professorial. In his younger days he was a solid and powerful artist, one of the soundest and simplest of whom France could boast. His pictures were dark in tone and harmonious, and had a puritanic charm. The portrait of Manet, and that of the engraver Edwin Edwards and his wife, in particular, will always preserve their historical value.

L’Art.
BOLDINI.   GIUSEPPE VERDI.

Later, when the whole bias of art tended away from the poorer classes, and once more approached this fashionable world, portrait painting also showed a tendency to become exquisite and over-refined, and to exhibit a preference for symphonic arrangements of colour and subtilised effects of light. White, light yellow, and light blue silks were harmonised upon very delicate scales with pearly-grey backgrounds. Ladies in mantles of light grey fur and rosy dresses stand amid dark-green shrubs, in which rose-coloured lanterns are burning, or they sit in a ball-dress near a lamp which produces manifold and tender transformations of light upon the white of the silk.

The work of Jacques Émile Blanche, the son of the celebrated mad-doctor, is peculiarly characteristic of these tendencies of French portrait painting. It is well known that English fashion was at this time regarded in Paris as the height of elegance, while Anglicisms were entering more and more into the French language; and this tendency of taste gave Blanche the occasion for most æsthetic pictures. The English Miss, in her attractive mixture of affectation and naïveté, in all her slim and long-footed grace, has found a delicate interpreter in him. Tall ladies clad in white, bitten with the Anglomania, drink tea most æsthetically, and sit there bored, or are grouped round the piano; gommeux, neat, straight, chic, from their tall hats to their patent-leather boots, look wearily about the world, with an eyeglass fixed, a yellow rose in their buttonhole, and a thick stick in the gloved hand. Amongst his portraits of well-known personalities, much notice was attracted by that of his father in 1890—a modern Bertin the Elder, and in 1891 by that of Maurice Barrès, a portrait in which he has analysed the author of Le Jardin de Bérénice in a very simple and convincing fashion.

Quantin, Paris.
WILLETTE.THE GOLDEN AGE.