In December 1899 Hachette published L’Image de la femme (Beautiful Women in Art), a luxurious work written by the Ministry of Fine Arts inspector and writer Armand Dayot (1851-1934). Through more than 300 illustrations, the best-selling author of L’Histoire de France par l’image fully intends to show that female portraits have been, from Antiquity to the 19th century, “the brilliant mirror reflecting the spirit of the times, the character of the races, the aesthetic of art movements, the ideal of artists.” This paper not only analyses the aesthetic and ideological underpinnings of this history of the female portrait, much influenced by Charles Baudelaire’s (1821-1867) Peintre de la vie moderne ( Painter of Modern Life), but also focuses on the way L’Image de la femme constitutes, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, a synthesis of and a statement of position in the debates concerning the definition of modernity in pictures.