Giovanni Boldini | Master of Swish

Master of Swish

- Time Magazine, April 3, 1933, p. 28-29

With her tongue ever so slightly in her check, Mrs. Chester Dale, collector and authority on French painting, helped organize four months ago an exhibition of the paintings of the late Alphonse Bouguereau, barroom decorator par excellence of the Gay Nineties.

Critics in the chill light of a formal art gallery were not impressed with the "Back to Bouguereau" movement.

Last week with a better artist and in a better cause (a loan exhibition at the Wildenstein Galleries for New York’s Child Welfare Committee), Maud Dale revived the work of one of M. Bouguereau’s contemporaries, the late Giovanni Boldini.

Giovanni Boldini ("Zanin" to intimates) was a society portraitist as artificial as any who ever stretched a lady’s fingers to tickle her vanity.

Modernists excuse Zanin Boldini for a virtue denied most Academicians, an exuberance, vivacity and frank sensuousness that won him the title of "Master of Swish", and made his huge canvases on view last week a series of gay explosions, brilliantly painted.

Born in Ferrara in 1842, he grew up to be a little fellow (half an inch too short for military service), with a mincing manner and a dome like forehead.
He abhorred Bohemianism, was always perfectly frank in his love of rich food, fine clothes, beautiful women.

His career took him first to Florence, then London, then Paris.

Ever since the Salon of 1875 his steady succession of portraits and mistresses had been gaining fame but it was not until the turn of the century that Boldini entered his Grand Period.

He was preeminently the artist of the Edwardian era, of the pompadour, the champagne supper and the ribbon-trimmed chemise.

The passing of the petticoat was the passing of Boldini’s art. He lived to be 88. Too purblind to paint, he could still drink champagne and chuck pretty young models under the chin.

In 1929, aged 86, he suddenly married. At his wedding breakfast he made a little speech: "It is not my fault if I am so old, it’s something which has happened to me all at once".

Boldini Exhibit, Wildenstein Galleries, New York, 1933

Life and career

Boldini was born in Ferrara, the son of a painter of religious subjects, and in 1862 went to Florence for six years to study and pursue painting.

He only infrequently attended classes at the Academy of Fine Arts, but in Florence, met other realist painters known as the Macchiaioli, who were Italian precursors to Impressionism. Their influence is seen in Boldini's landscapes which show his spontaneous response to nature, although it is for his portraits that he became best known.

Moving to London, Boldini attained success as a portraitist. He completed portraits of premier members of society including Lady Holland and the Duchess of Westminster.

From 1872 he lived in Paris, where he became a friend of Edgar Degas.

He also became the most fashionable portrait painter in Paris in the late 19th century, with a dashing style of painting which shows some Macchiaioli influence and the style reminds us the work of younger artists, such as John Singer Sargent and Paul Helleu.

He was nominated commissioner of the Italian section of the Paris Exposition in 1889, and received the Légion d'honneur for this appointment.

A Boldini portrait of his former muse Marthe de Florian, a French actress, was discovered in a Paris flat in late 2010, hidden away from view on the premises that were unvisited for 70 years.

The portrait has never been listed, exhibited or published and the flat belonged to de Florian's granddaughter who went to live in the South of France at the outbreak of the Second World War and never returned.

A love-note and a biographical reference to the work painted in 1888, when the actress was 24, cemented its authenticity.

The full length portrait of the lady in the same clothing and accessories, but less provocative, hangs in the New Orleans Museum of Art.

References in modern culture

Giovanni Boldini is a character in the ballet Franca Florio, regina di Palermo, written in 2007 by the Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, which depicts the story of Donna Franca, a famous Sicilian aristocrat whose exceptional beauty inspired him and many other artists, musicians, poets and emperors during the Belle Époque.