Anatole France — 'The Greatest Living Frenchman'

Guth depicts the Nobel laureate novelist seated in voluminous grey robes and a red skullcap, one hand raised in a rhetorical gesture — an allusion to his clerical-intellectual persona and his famous anticlerical novel L'Étui de nacre. Behind him, faintly sketched in gold, a mounted knight bearing a banner evokes Joan of Arc, whose legend France had recently retold. The caption crowns him 'The Greatest Living Frenchman,' an unironic accolade rare for Vanity Fair's usually deflating tone. The portrait is notably generous: no grotesque distortion, the white goatee rendered with dignity. France's Dreyfusard politics and socialist sympathies made him a hero to Liberal British opinion, which likely explains the reverence.