Born in Ferrara, Giovanni Boldini received his training from his father Antonio. His talent was soon recognized and, at the age of eighteen, he was already known in his native town as an accomplished portrait painter. 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. In 1871, following a trip to London, where the portraits of Gainsborough and Reynolds left an indelible mark on the artist, Boldini settled in Paris. In 1874 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars, winning public acclaim. In 1876, he travelled to Germany, where he met Adolf von Menzel, and to Holland, where he admired the portraiture of Frans Hals.  Around that time, Boldini started to paint portraits of beautiful society women. In fact, his bold, painterly technique and flamboyant style proved so popular with the increasingly fashion-conscious society, that, by the turn of the century, Boldini had become one of the leading portrait painters in Europe, achieving a success in Paris equal to that of his friend John Singer Sargent in London. 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. Boldini befriended other society portrait painters such as Paul-César Helleu, James A. McNeill Whistler, and in particular Degas, who truly admired his work and once said of his friend: ‘Ce diable d’italien est un monstre de talent’. A tireless and extremely prolific painter and draughtsman, Boldini remained active to the very end of his life. In 1916, however, his eyesight began to deteriorate, and from 1927 he executed only charcoal drawings.

While Boldini owes his celebrity to his portraits, he began his career as a landscape painter with the Macchiaioli movement in Florence, and continued to work in this genre throughout his life.  His attentiveness to nature is very apparent in the presentwork which subtly conveys an autumnal bluster in the sway of the slender tree, the brown leaves about to fall and the bare twigs.  This movement in nature is matched by that suggested in the figure for although the woman is portrayed only bust length we perceive an animation in her pose as if she was walking through the landscape. The strands of hair escaping from her ribbon are done with bold sweeps of the brush, as are the leaves and the branches so that the sense of movement is inherent in the surface of the watercolour as is so characteristic of Boldini’s oils.   This spontaneity, the sparseness of the scene and the way in which the landscape acts as a screen above and behind the portrait illustrates  Boldini’s interest – still fashionable at the time – in Japonism and the art of the East. Curiously, the motif of the etiolated, almost leafless tree, placed at the centre of the sheet, is one which clearly had some resonance for the artist and recurs in a number of watercolours and drawings dating from various moments in Boldini’s career. (1)

Notes

1. See Andrea Buzzoni, Museo Giovanni Boldini, Catalogo generale completamente illustrato,  Moderna 1997, p.154, `Dopo l’uragano’ and `Paesaggio di bufera’ and Tav. 32 and 33, `Paesaggio con alberi’. And p.353 V. `Albero’ and Bianca Doria, Giovanni Boldini, catalogo generale dagli archive Boldini, Milan 2000, p.369 `Notte su Boulevard Berthier’.