Giovanni Boldini

Baron Maurice de Rothschild (acquired directly from the artist)
Thence by descent (and sold: Christie's, New York, November 1, 1995, lot 8, illustrated)
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Portrait of a Lady, Lina Bilitis, with two Pekinese immediately stands out among Boldini's early twentieth century portraits for his use of a broadly suggested outdoor setting rather than the stylized salon or sitting room with which he usually surrounded his women of fashion. Lina Bilitis was an Englishwoman, a friend of Boldini's and a frequent model for the artist in the years around 1913. Although painted on a life-size scale and with all the attention to costume detail that he gave his major portrait commissions, Portrait of a Lady, Lina Bilitis, with two Pekinese was a work of pure artistic invention, undertaken by Boldini for his own satisfaction.

The park-like setting may have been inspired by an actual outing with Lina, who was a regular companion of Boldini's in the years immediately before World War I.  Or it may have sprung entirely from Boldini's imagination, as an appropriate backdrop for his model's informal costume, with her up-to-the-moment short jacket, ankle-baring dress, and eccentric, floppy hat.  Whatever the motive, the melange of tree trunks and stage-flat bushes holds his model to the ground, in counterweight to the upward sweep of her streamlined pose and the exaggerated length of her elegant legs.  The slashy green bushes emphasize the dramatic emerald colored notes in Lina's costume and provide a complement to the red-brown dogs with whom she shares her walk in the park. Boldini presents Lina as a supremely poised example of chic et chien, the popular code phrase for an elegant Frenchwoman strolling with her omnipresent small dog.