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 painted portraits, he was equally at ease and prolific with watercolours, which survive in considerable quantities in museums and private collection alike.

The present watercolour is executed with the frantic energy that characterizes Boldini’s work. In the foreground, a bearded clergyman dressed in the black cassock worn by priests, is looking up in admiration, or perhaps, in ecstasy. Behind his right shoulder, is the head of another figure, which is so summarily and swiftly outlined with just a few brush strokes as to appear like a caricature. The figure of the priest is vigorously painted, and boldly set against the background, which is dominated by the large window decorated with ornamental diamond-shaped clear glass and with, in its centre, a stained-glass window showing Saint Martin Dividing His Cloak with a Beggar. The sheet is painted in vibrant touches of coloured washes, with the priest’s cossack broadly executed in solid black paint, so as to enhance the figure’s dominant position in the foreground, whereas the second figure and the background are tinted in more diluted washes of light brown and touches of green and red highlights. The stained-glass window with Saint Martin and the beggar is coloured with delicate touches of blue, green, red, and yellow.

Amongst the handful of watercolours of French and Italian church interiors known in museums and private collections, some have been identified as depicting the Cathedrals of Amiens and Bordeaux, and the Abbey of Moissac. Mostly square in format and of the same, large size (between 450 and 500 mm), they generally date from the first decade of the 20th century.  Among these, the Portrait of a Man Seated in a Church formerly in the Baron Maurice de Rothschild collection, and now in a private collection (1), provides the best comparison with the present watercolour: there too, the composition shows a figure prominently placed in the foreground, and set against a more subtly painted background with a colourful stained-glass window.

Considering the subject illustrated on the stained-glass window, it is tempting to suggest that the interior represented in this watercolour might be that of the Cathedral of Amiens, where the episode took place, or the Church of St Martin in Tours, whose bishop the saint eventually became. However, the episodes from the life of this highly popular saint were so often represented in the stained-glass windows of French churches, that the identification of the church represented in this watercolour on the basis of its subject alone, must remains hypothetical.