Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Giovanni Boldini
Ferrara 1842 - Paris
19
The Audience at the Opéra Garnier
Oil on panel.
87.5 x 39 cm (34 1 /4 x 15 1 /4 in.)
Provenance: The artist’s studio, bears inventory
number: 87B at[elier] Boldini/ … Boldini… / 1931; his
posthumous sale, Paris, Galerie Charpentier, M. Rheims,
16 June 1955, lot 46; private collection, France.
Exhibited: Paris, Hôtel Jean Charpentier, 7-31 May
1931, cat.74; Florence, Palazzo Pitti, La peinture
française à Florence, 1945, cat.138; Paris, sale Galerie
Charpentier, 16 June 1955, Atelier Boldini et à divers
amateurs, cat.46.
Literature: Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and Ettore
Camesasca, L’opera completa di Boldini, Milan 1970,
p.102-3, no.148; Bianca Doria, Giovanni Boldini:
catalogo generale dagli archivi Boldini, Milan 2000,
no.203; Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Giovanni
Boldini 1842-1931. Catalogo Ragionato, Turin 2002,
vol.III (section 1), p.256, no.466; Tiziano Panconi,
Giovanni Boldini. L’opera completa, Florence 2002,
p.268.
more impassive but the women are a whirlwind of silk,
feathers, long arms in opera gloves, and lit faces, their
gestures perfectly expressing a mood of anticipation,
expectation. A pencil drawing of a spectator seen
from the back, now in the Museo G. Boldini may
date from the same moment 2 . . Last seen publicly in
the 1955 exhibition and only known from black and
white photographs, this superbly preserved and large
panel is brilliant, dynamic and highly refined, tonally
vibrant and rich in texture. The scale of the painting,
over three times the size of his usual works on panel
and with a strikingly elongated shape, emphasises the
experimental nature of the work. Boldini also drew
and painted a number of studies of spectators at the
Dating from 1886 this picture marks a definitive step
from the jewel-like perfectionism of the early Parisian
period to the increasing abstraction of Boldini’s
experimental mid career. This exceptional panel was
kept in Boldini’s studio, it was exhibited a few months
before the artist’s death at the Hôtel Jean Charpentier
in 1931 as a ‘Panneau double’, with the verso visible,
a much more sketchy and unresolved view of the
audience from the opposite side of the Opera (fig.1).
The panel was shortly afterwards divided (certainly
before 1945 when the present work was exhibited
at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence), as has happened
on other occasions with a number of Boldini’s panel
works, and the other section passed into the Fassini
collection in Rome 1 . The precise area of the auditorium
of the Paris Opera which Boldini has focused on here
is identifiable from the plasterwork cartouche and
gilded balcony rail and columns as the upper few rows
of the stalls. The artist presents the scene as if he is
right in amongst the mêlée of the audience, part of
the jostling and gossip taking place before the curtain
rises or in the interval; one woman smoothes her hair,
one turns away from us, pushing herself forward and
craning her neck to see into the crowd. The men seem
1. Giovanni Boldini, At the Opera,
oil on panel, formerly Fassini Collection.
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