Giovanni Boldini

Giovanni Boldini (31 December 1842 – 11 January 1931) was an Italian genre and portrait painter who lived and worked in Paris for most of his career. He is remembered above all for his portraits of fashionable society in the Belle Époque, for a loose, vibrant brushwork and for the way he captured movement in dresses, figures and gestures. Although his professional life unfolded in France, his Italian training and his ties with the Macchiaioli shaped much of his work.

Childhood and training in Ferrara

Boldini was born in Ferrara in 1842, the eighth of thirteen children of Antonio and Benvenuta Caleffi. His father, a painter in the purist tradition who also worked as a restorer, gave him his first lessons in drawing. The elder Boldini was said to be technically accomplished and to make fine copies after Raphael and Venetian landscape painters, so the young Giovanni grew up surrounded by classical models and a careful craft. From 1858 he attended the painting courses of Girolamo Domenichini and Giovanni Pagliarini, held in the Palazzo dei Diamanti, and he had the chance to study at first hand the great Ferrarese painters of the Quattrocento, as well as Dosso Dossi and Parmigianino.

His first important work was The Courtyard of the Family House, an oil dated 1855. Late in that decade came a Self-Portrait at Sixteen and portraits of his brother Francesco, of Maria Angelini and of Vittore Carletti. These early pieces already reveal an interest in portraiture, the genre that would come to dominate his career.

Florence and the circle of the Macchiaioli

In 1862 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where he studied under Stefano Ussi and Enrico Pollastrini. He attended classes only irregularly. His real education came from the city's cafés, above all the Caffè Michelangiolo, the meeting place of Florentine artists. There he got to know Giovanni Fattori, Odoardo Borrani, Telemaco Signorini and Cristiano Banti, whose villas at Montorsoli and Montemurlo he visited as a guest. With them he shared a search for a painting of light and direct observation, which is now associated with the Macchiaioli, the Italian precursors of Impressionism. His landscapes show that spontaneous response to nature, though his reputation would rest mainly on his portraits.

He was drawn early to the elegant salons of aristocratic and middle-class society. As a guest of the Falconer family he decorated, between 1867 and 1870, the walls of a small room in their villa La Falconiera at Pistoia, using dry tempera. The house was bought in 1938 by the painter's widow, and about a hundred of his works are still kept there. This bond with high society would remain a constant throughout his career.

Travels, London and the move to Paris

In 1866 he travelled to Naples with Banti, whom he painted on several occasions. The following year he went to France with the Falconers. At Monte Carlo he painted the Generale spagnolo, which he later regarded as one of the best things of his youth. In Paris he visited the Universal Exhibition and met Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley and Édouard Manet, sharing a period of intense renewal in painting.

In 1870 he settled in London at the invitation of William Cornwallis-West, whom he had met in Florence. Cornwallis-West gave him a studio in the centre of the city, frequented by high society, yet by the end of the year Boldini was back in Florence. The definitive move came in October 1871, when he settled permanently in Paris. He opened a studio on the Avenue Frochot and later another on Place Pigalle, where he lived with the model Berthe, who appears in many compositions of those years.

Success in Paris and society portraiture

In Paris he worked for Goupil, the city's most important dealer, whose stable already included highly successful painters such as Mariano Fortuny and Ernest Meissonier, as well as the Italians Giuseppe Palizzi and Giuseppe De Nittis. For the firm he produced a series of genre pictures in the eighteenth-century taste, then very fashionable. In 1874 his painting The Washerwomen was a success at the Paris Salon.

His private life and his career evolved together over the decade. He ended his relationship with Berthe and began another with the Countess Gabrielle de Rasty, whose portrait he showed at the Salon of 1875. That same year he briefly returned to Ferrara after the death of his mother. In 1876 he travelled to Germany, where he met and painted the great artist Adolph von Menzel, and to Holland, where he admired the work of Frans Hals. By the 1880s he was already a sought-after portraitist among the so-called bel mondo.

In 1889 he was named commissioner of the Italian section of the Paris Universal Exhibition, where he showed three of his portraits, among them the well-known Portrait of Emiliana Concha de Ossa. His decision to enlarge the format of his canvases is attributed to the influence of the Swedish painter Anders Zorn, whom he met in the 1890s.

Verdi, Donna Franca and the salon controversies

One of the most cited episodes of his career is the portrait of Giuseppe Verdi. He painted it first on canvas in 1886 and gave the picture to the composer seven years later in Milan. Not satisfied, he redid the subject in pastel on paper, in five hours. He kept this second version, showed it at the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and at the First Venice Biennale in 1897, and finally donated it to the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Rome in 1918. He also attended the premiere of Verdi's Otello at La Scala in Milan on 5 February 1887, having been invited to the box.

His quick, brilliant brushwork, daring necklines and bold poses brought him great popularity and some controversy. In the spring of 1900 he was a guest of the Florio family in Palermo to paint Donna Franca. Her husband disliked the portrait because of the wide neckline and the legs visible a little below the knee, so it was altered. It was later sold in 1928 for a million lire. In Paris it was seized by the Nazi occupiers, taken to Germany and badly damaged, which forced the lower part of the canvas to be cut away.

Final years, death and legacy

In 1904 he asked for the hand of Alaide Banti, daughter of his friend Cristiano, but the wedding never took place, and in Paris he began a relationship with Madame de Joss de Couchy. When the First World War broke out in 1914 he moved to Nice with his model Lina, and stayed there until 1918. Ill and with failing eyesight, in 1926 he met the young journalist Emilia Cardona, whom he married on 29 October 1929. He died in Paris on 11 January 1931 and was buried in Ferrara, his native city, near his family, in the Cimitero Monumentale della Certosa.

His work continued to be exhibited around the world. In 1938, seven years after his death, the Newhouse Galleries in New York City held an exhibition of his paintings. In 2008 the show Boldini Mon Amour was presented at the Polo Espositivo ex-Terme Tamerici in Montecatini Terme, and in 2022 the Petit Palais in Paris staged a major retrospective, Giovanni Boldini: Les plaisirs et les jours. His legacy is that of a portraitist who combined the light-filled observation of the Macchiaioli with the restless energy of fashionable life at the end of the nineteenth century, leaving images that still shape how the Belle Époque is pictured.