Giovanni Boldini's Paintings
Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931) : Painter, portraitist, and genre painter from Italy. On December 31, 1842, in Ferrara, Italy, he was born into an artist's family. He attended the Florentine Academy of Arts for six years. He was influenced by Edouard Manet, Thomas Gainsborough, and other 17th and 18th century English portrait painters. Giovanni Boldini began working in London in 1869, where he rose to prominence as a portrait painter. In 1871, he relocated to Paris and began exhibiting his work at the Salon. Giovanni Boldini excelled in generating sophisticatedly attractive pictures of graceful, sophisticated beauty and secular dandy aesthetes in Parisian high society. Boldini drew on the expertise of plein air masters and impressionists. The dexterity of the artist's painting style and the stunning harmony of colour differentiate his works.
Giovanni Boldini began to paint female portraits in 1872, after eventually settling in Paris. His postures were dynamic, but his arrangement and colour palette were rigorously controlled. Boldini used large and strong strokes to paint those depicted in a loose, spontaneous style. The shades of grey and white, similar to Whistler's, and the virtually monochromatic colouring represented unfathomable states of mind; by the end of the century, this formula of colour asceticism had become the "language of the initiates" - a symbol of refined, aristocratic aestheticism. Giovanni Boldini has established himself in the creative Parisian milieu as a master of virtuosic secular portraiture since the 1880s, characterised by the emotive portrayal of coquettish-daring ladies of high society and their elegant evening gowns.
The spirit of the "end of the century," fin de siecle, pervades the bravura and spectacular painting of Boldini, in which contemporaries perceived a direct heir to the great traditions of the past masters.
Portraits of Adolf Menzel (1895, Berlin-Dahlem) and James Whistler (1897, New York, Brooklyn Museum) establish him as a profound and perceptive portrait painter. Between 1890 and 1910, Giovanni Boldini painted a series of spectacular portraits of prominent personalities, artists, and theatregoers. In this regard, he was a formidable competitor to John Singer Sargent. Boldini received the Grand Prix at the World Exhibitions in Paris twice, in 1889 and 1900. After the master's death in 1932, his personal show was included in the Venice Biennale; in 1933, a memorial exhibition was created in New York. At an exhibition of Italian art in Paris in 1935, eight works by Giovanni Boldini were displayed, including six portraits of composer G. Verdi and poet Count Robert de Montesquieu. In 1959, Boldini's paintings were shown alongside Sargent's work in a special exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Boldini died on January 12, 1931, in Paris.
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