GIOVANNI BOLDINI | The Artist's Model

Galleria La Fenice, Venice

Private collection, Milan; thence by descent to the present owner

Ettore Camesasca, L'opera completa di Boldini, Milan, 1970, pp. 112-113, no. 290, catalogued & illustrated (dated circa 1898)

Bianca Doria, Giovanni Boldini. Catalogo generale degli archivi Boldini, Milan, 2000, no. 378, catalogued & illustrated

Tiziano Panconi, Boldini, L'opera completa, Florence, 2002, p. 378, catalogued & illustrated (dated circa 1897)

Piero Dini & Francesca Dini, Giovanni Boldini 1842-1931, catalogo ragionato, vol. III, tomo II, Turin, 2002, p. 387, no. 716, catalogued & illustrated

'In the risky art of accentuating, through the unforeseen movement, the unexpected, often daring pose, the grace and the seductive note of his models, Boldini knows no rivals'.

The critic François Thiébault-Sisson

Painted circa 1897-98.

While Boldini’s career as a portrait painter grew steadily during the 1880s and 1890s, he also painted numerous intimate oil paintings in a decidedly more erotic spirit, of which the present work is a prime example.

Here, a model poses seductively in a delicate pink-silk dress. Although she is fully dressed, an erotic tension between her and the viewer is palpable. The barely sketched rectangular shape in the background resembles a painter’s easel, suggestive of the artist’s studio. In sketches like this Boldini is seen at his most free, the fluid brushstrokes and sinuous lines lending his works an expressiveness but also a decorative idiom rooted in art nouveau. The tonalities also call to mind the work of James McNeil Whistler, Boldini's contemporary in Paris.