The brilliant Italian Boldini brought to this English chic the manual volubility of a Southerner: sometimes he was microscopic à la Meissonier, sometimes a juggler of the brush à la Fortuny, and sometimes he gave the most seductive mannerism and the most diverting elegance to his portraits of ladies. Born in 1845, the son of a painter of saints, Boldini had begun as a Romanticist with pictures for Scott’s Ivanhoe. From Ferrara he went to Florence, where he remained six years. At the end of the sixties he emerged in London, and, after he had painted Lady Holland and the Duchess of Westminster there, he soon became a popular portrait painter. But since 1872 his home has been Paris, where the fine Anglo-Saxon aroma, the “æsthetic” originality of his pictures, soon became an object of universal admiration. In his portraits of women Boldini always renders what is most novel. It is as if he knew in advance the new fashion which the coming season would bring. His trenchantly cut figures of ladies in white dresses and with black gloves have a defiant and insolent effect, and yet one which is captivating through their ultra-modern chic. The portraits of Carolus Duran have nothing of that charm which makes such an appeal to the nerves, nothing of that discomposing indefinable quality which lies in the expression and gestures of a fashionable woman, whose eccentricity reveals every day fresh nuances of beauty. He had not the faculty of seizing movement, the most difficult element in the world. But Boldini’s pictures seem like bold and sudden sketches which clinch the conception with spirit and swiftness in liberal, pointed crayon strokes controlled by keen observation. There is no ornament, no bracelet, no pillars and drapery. One hears the silken bodice rustle over the tightly laced corset, sees the mobile foot, and the long train swept to the side with a bold movement. Sometimes his creations are full and luxuriant, nude even in their clothes, excited and full of movement; sometimes they are bodiless, as if compact of the air, pallid and half-dead with the strain of nights of festivity, “living with hardly any blood in their veins, in which the pulse beats almost entirely out of complaisance.”

FORAIN.   AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRES.
(By permission of M. Durand-Ruel, the owner of the copyright.)

His pictures of children are just as subtle: there is an elasticity in these little girls with their widely opened velvet eyes, their rosy young lips, and their poses calculated with so much coquetry. Boldini has an indescribable method of seizing a motion of the head, a mien, or a passing flash of the eyes, of arranging the hair, of indicating coquettish lace underclothing beneath bright silk dresses, or of showing the grace and fineness of the slender leg of a girl, encased in a black silk stocking, and dangling in delicate lines from a light grey sofa. There is French esprit, something piquant and with a double meaning in his art, which borders on the indecorous and is yet charming. These portraits of ladies, however, form but a small portion of his work. He paints in oils, in water-colour, and pastel, and is equally marvellous in handling the portraits of men, the street picture and the landscape. His portrait of the painter John Lewis Brown, crossing the street with his wife and daughter, looked as though it had been painted in one jet. In his little pictures of horses there is an astonishing animation and nervous energy. M. Faure, the singer, possesses some small rococo pictures from his brush, scenes in the Garden of the Tuileries, which might have come from Fortuny. His pictures from the street life of Paris—the Place Pigalle, the Place Clichy—recall De Nittis, and some illustrations—scenes from the great Paris races—might have been drawn by Caran D’Ache.

There is no need to treat illustration in greater detail, because, naturally, it could no longer play the initiative part which fell to it in earlier days, now that the whole of life had been drawn within the compass of pictorial representation. Besides, in an epoch like our own, which is determined to know and see and feel everything, illustration has been so extended that it would be quite impossible even to select the most important work. Entirely apart from the many painters who occasionally illustrated novels or other books, such as Bastien-Lepage, Gervex, Dantan, Détaille, Dagnan-Bouveret, Ribot, Benjamin Constant, Jean Paul Laurens, and others, there are a number of professional draughtsmen in Paris, most of whom are really distinguished artists.

In particular, Chéret, one of the most original artists of our time—Chéret, the great king of posters, the monarch of a fabulously charming world, in which everything gleams in blue and red and orange, cannot be passed over in a history of painting. The flowers which he carelessly strews on all sides with his spendthrift hand are not destined for preservation in an historical herbarium; his works are transient flashes of spirit, brilliantly shining, ephemera, but a bold and subtle Parisian art is concealed amid this improvisation. Settled for many years in London, Jules Chéret had there already drawn admirable placards, which are now much sought after by collectors.

In 1866 he introduced this novel branch of industry into France, and gave it—thanks to the invention of machines which admit of the employment of the largest lithographic stones—an artistic development which could not have been anticipated. He has created many thousands of posters. The book-trade, the great shops, and almost all branches of industry owe their success to him. His theatrical posters alone are amongst the most graceful products of modern art: La Fête des Mitrons, La Salle de Frascati, Les Mongolis, Le Chat Botté, L’Athénée Comique, Fantaisies Music-Hall, La Fée Cocotte, Les Tsiganes, Les Folies-Bergères en Voyage, Spectacle Concert de l’Horloge, Skating Rink, Les Pillules du Diable, La Chatte Blanche, Le Petit Faust, La Vie Parisienne, Le Droit du Seigneur, Cendrillon, Orphée aux Enfers, Éden Théâtre, etc. These are mere posters, destined to hang for a few days at the street corners, and yet in graceful ease, sparkling life, and coquettish bloom of colour they surpass many oil paintings which flaunt upon the walls of the Musée Luxembourg.

Baschet.
CAZIN.JUDITH.
Baschet.
CAZIN.   HAGAR AND ISHMAEL.

Amongst the illustrators Willette is perhaps the most charming, the most brilliant in grace, fancy, and spirit. A drawing by him is something living, light, and fresh. Only amongst the Japanese, or the great draughtsmen of the rococo period, does one find plates of a charm similar to Willette’s tender poems of the “Chevalier Printemps” or the “Baiser de la Rose.” At the same time there is something curiously innocent, something primitive, naïve, something like the song of a bird, in his charming art. No one can laugh with such youthful freshness. No one has such a childlike fancy. Willette possesses the curious gift of looking at the world like a boy of sixteen with eyes that are not jaded for all the beauty of things, with the eyes of a schoolboy in love for the first time. He has drawn angels for Gothic windows, battles, and everything imaginable; nevertheless, woman is supreme over his whole work, ruined and pure as an angel, cursed and adored, and yet always enchanting. She is Manon Lescaut, with her soft eyes and angelically pure sins. She has something of the lovely piquancy of the woman of Brantôme, when she disdainfully laughs out of countenance poor Pierrot, who sings his serenades to her plaintively in the moonlight. One might say that Willette is himself his Pierrot, dazzled with the young bosoms and rosy lips: at one time graceful and laughing, wild as a young fellow who has just escaped from school; at another earnest and angry, like an archangel driving away the sinful; to-day fiery, and to-morrow melancholy; now in love, teasing, blithe, and tender, now gloomy and in mortal trouble. He laughs amid tears and weeps amid laughter, singing the Dies Iræ after a couplet of Offenbach; himself wears a black-and-white garment, and is, at the same time, mystic and sensuous. His plates are as exhilarating as sparkling champagne, and breathe the soft, plaintive spirit of old ballads.