Giovanni Boldini Ferrara 1842-1931 Paris 25 Berthe Smoking (La sigarette) Oil on panel. signed and dated Boldini 74 at lower left. 67 x 55 cms. (26 ¼ x 21 ¾ in.) Provenance: Galerie Georges Petit, sale <strong>Catalogue</strong> de tableaux modernes composant la collection de M. V., 3 rd May 1892, n°3, illustrated p. 7; Private Collection. Literature: Carlo L. Ragghianti & Ettore Camesasca, L’opera completa di Boldini, n° 19, illustrated p. 91; Bianca Doria, Giovanni Boldini, Catalogo generale dagli Archivi Boldini, Rizzoli, Milano 2000, n°60; Francesca Dini, Piero Dini, Giovanni Boldini 1842-1931: catalogo ragionato, Allemandi, Torino, 2002, vol. 3, n° 175, p. 106, Illustrated. Born in Ferrara, Giovanni Boldini received his training from his father Antonio, a painter of religious subject. His talent was soon recognized and, at the age of eighteen, he was already known in his native town as an accomplished portraitist. Boldini travelled to Florence in 1862, where he formed close friendships with artists of the revolutionary movement of the Macchiaioli, such as Giovanni Fattori, Telemaco Signorini and Silvestro Lega. An astute businessman and unabashed self-promoter, Boldini soon realized that, to reach a truly international audience he would have to relocate to Paris, a city which was fast becoming the nucleus for the European artistic scene and also the economic focus for the leading dealers of the day. After a trip to London in 1869, where he asmired and assimilated the work of Gainsborough and Reynolds, in 1871, Boldini settled in the French capital, primarily though not exclusively for the dealer, Goupil, like several other Italian artists such as De Nittis, Zandomeneghi and Mancini, and for whom he painted landscapes and minute, essentially fanciful genre scenes in the manner of Meissonier. In 1874, Boldini exhibited for the first time to great public acclaim at the Salon du Champs-de-Mars, and in the following years he travelled to Germany, where he met Adolphe von Menzel and to Holland, further refining his style by studying the portraiture of Frans Hals. The artist befriended other society portrait painters such as Paul-César Helleu and James A. McNeill Whistler, and became a close friend of Degas who truly admired his work and once said of his friend: “Ce diable d’italien est un monstre de talent”. By the 1880’s, Boldini had begun to paint his celebrated portraits of society beauties. With a sharp eye, bold, virtuoso brushstrokes and typically flamboyant style, Boldini captured not only the character and vitality of the sitter, but also the spontaneity and evanescent spirit of a magnificently decadent and sophisticated society that had gravitated towards Paris in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Among his numerous portraits, those of Giuseppe Verdi, Whistler, Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough, Count Robert de Montesquiou, Princess Bibesco and the Marchesa Casati, are but a few of the artist’s most famous sitters. Indeed, by the early years of the twentieth century, Boldini had become the most fashionable portrait painter of Belle Époque Paris, achieving the kind of success enjoyed by his friend, John Singer Sargent in London. He had a self confessed love of high society, champagne and elegant ladies but was a prolific and tireless painter who remained active to the end of his long life, though in the last few years, failing eyesight meant he restricted himself to working in charcoal. In 1929, aged 86, he married for the first time; at his wedding speech, with charismatic wit, he said: “It is not my fault if I am so old, its something which has happened to me all at once”. 1 Until its recent reappearance from a private collection, this superb panel was only know through a black and white photograph. In pristine state of preservation, it can now be fully appreciated in its glittering colours and vibrant palette, so typical of Boldini’s great virtuosity. The sitter is Berthe, a young dressmaker, who became the artist’s first Parisian model, as well as his lover for over a decade. In Berthe, Boldini found the quintessential elements of the modern Parisian woman. She was an exquisite and beautifully dressed model, with a capricious personality. Her elegance was characterised by her gentle ways and her 78
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