Berthe admiring a fan

Berthe Admiring a Fan, painted on canvas in 1878, belongs to a category of Boldini's work that sits between portraiture and genre painting — an identified or named figure (Berthe) engaged in a specific social activity (admiring a fan) in a way that makes the subject as much the activity as the person. The fan was a significant accessory in late nineteenth-century social life, particularly in the fashionable Paris circles Boldini frequented. Fans were exchanged between social acquaintances, decorated by artists, collected as objets d'art, and wielded as instruments of social communication. Painters from Degas to Cassatt depicted women with fans as a way of engaging with feminine social life and the material culture of the Belle Époque. Boldini's treatment is likely warmer and more intimate than a formal portrait — Berthe engaged with the fan rather than presenting herself to the viewer creates a more private, observed quality. The 1878 date places this in his early Parisian establishment, when such small, charming subjects helped build his reputation among collectors.

The fan itself — its ribs, the decorated surface of the leaves, and the gesture of the hands holding it — would have demanded careful rendering of different materials: bone or ivory ribs, painted or printed paper or silk, and the reflective quality of any gilded elements. Boldini handles such complex objects with selective precision, resolving key details while leaving surrounding passages gestural. Warm interior lighting gives the scene its intimate quality.