Giovanni Boldini

Sale: Galerie Charpentier, Paris, May 28, 1954, lot 34, illustrated
Baronne Alix de Rothschild Collection, Paris
Derek Johns, London
Acquired from the above

Piero Dini and Francesca Dini, Giovanni Boldini 1842-1931 catalogo ragionato, Turin, 2002, p. 457, no. 868, illustrated

On a stable panel. Under UV: Isolated dots of inpainting at top center.
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Boldini's career as a portrait painter grew steadily during the 1880s and 1890s, and by the dawn of the twentieth century he had become the most sought-after portrait painter in Europe. Some of the wealthiest and most influential members of European and American society passed through his elegant Parisian studio and sat for him, including Elizabeth Wharton Drexel, John Singer Sargent, Giuseppe Verdi, Sarah Bernhardt and the Marchesa Casati.

In these society portraits, Boldini had an uncanny ability to create an energetic frisson between his sitter and the viewer, and amplify the erotic tension brought by desire and envy. In reviewing the Salon in 1896, Francois Thiébault-Sisson concedes that “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” (as quoted in Sarah Lees, Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris, exh. cat., New Haven, 2009, p. 194). In many of his large scale portraits, Boldini coaxes his female models to lean in with their torsos and tilt their heads back, exposing themselves and as much skin as acceptable.

While he toyed with the flirtatious sensuality of his society sitters, over the course of his career Boldini simultaneously created a collection of intimate oil paintings with a decidedly more carnal spirit; examples include La Toilette (Femme s’essuyant) (Private collection, Dini, no. 337), The Couple (Private Collection, Dini, no. 860) and multiple variations of Leda and the Swan (Dini, nos. 390 – 392) in which his subjects are bound in ecstatic embrace, limbs and wings akimbo. The present work, Solo con lo specchio (also known as Nu aux bas noirs), is one of these erotic oil paintings that Boldini painted with the intent to titillate or perhaps as a souvenir of one of his amorous conquests. Here he is either invisible to his subject or ignored by her; his own voyeuristic position echoed by the pleasure his model takes in viewing herself in the mirror. Propped on a pile of golden cushions, she wears nothing but sheer black stockings, garter, and a high heeled shoe that is pressed against the flesh of her left buttock. Boldini has rendered the whole composition with but a few confident strokes, leaving the bare board exposed to heighten his gestural sense of urgency.