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.
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."