BOLDINI, Giovanni

Boldini brought a revolutionary approach to portrait painting, applying broad areas of tone and colour and of light and dark patterns along with a low vantage point. He also introduced a novel treatment of the background as an ambience displaying the sitter’s milieu and interests. The sitter of the present painting was the twelve-year-old daughter of fellow painter Cristiano Banti. During a prolonged stay as a guest in the Banti home, Boldini became romantically involved with her. For unknown reasons their marriage plans were later abruptly cancelled.

The upper-class ladies in Paris appreciated Boldini’s work because they knew that the well-traveled artist could be relied upon to produce their likeness with elegance and to their advantage.

The present work was executed with quick, light brush strokes. The extravagant, fleeting lightness is typical of the spirit of the fin de si�cle.

The majestic long-horned white oxen of Tuscany were an attractive subject even for an artist like Boldini, who usually preferred portraits to landscape paintings. Both the peasant at the left as well as the cart at the right are cut off from the picture plane, thus stressing the animals’ presence as the main focus of attention. The bright red of the garlands and the cart are effectively set off against their white bodies.

The mid-nineteenth century in Italy was the period of the Risorgimento, the movement that culminated in Italian unification. That movement provided the political and cultural backdrop for one of the most important and influential groups in Italian art in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Macchiaioli. This group of landscape, portrait and genre painters, flourishing from about 1850 to 1880, was based on Florence. The core of the Macchiaioli consisted of eleven painters born between 1824 and 1838, most important of them among the older painters were Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Serafino de Tivoli, and Vincenzo Cabianca, while Giuseppe Abbati and Telemaco Signorini belonged to the younger. There were some other artists associated with the group to varying extent, such as Guglielmo Ciardi, Giuseppe de Nittis, Federigo Zandomeneghi, and Giovanni Boldini. The last-named three all took their bearings from France, and eventually moved to Paris.

Boldini moved to Paris in 1871. He adopted only certain features of French Impressionism, notably the emphasis on plein-air painting. He largely remained a skilful painter of society portraits, something which had been his forte as early as in his Macchiaioli 1860s. In France he relaxed his technique considerably, though to a significant extent he retained the Italian chiaroscuro effects and broad brushwork. Boldini was an acute observer of his fellow beings, and one of his finest works is the virtuoso Portrait of Mlle Lantelme, with its arrestingly bold, unconstrained brush-strokes.