Watercolour. Signed and dated in pen and black ink at centre: Boldini/ 1905.
507 x 357 mm. (20 x 14 in.)
LITERATURE: Piero Dini, Francesca Dini, Giovanni Boldini 1842-1931, Catalogo Ragionato, Torino, 2002, vol. II, cat.879 and vol. I, p.305, listed amongst the portraits signed and dated 1905: “Ritratto di Signora (madame Debussy).
Giovanni Boldini was already well-known as an accomplished portrait painter by the time he arrived in Florence from his native Ferrara in 1862. He came into contact there with the Macchiaioli, a group of progressive artists who were opposed to academic teachings. His innate taste for wealth and luxury brought him into contact with established artists and their patrons, while travel, both in Italy and Europe, widened his horizons. His small portraits of friends, painted in the 1860s, show a new approach to the genre which was to influence its development in Tuscany. Boldini settled in Paris in 1871 after a visit to London. At first, he worked for the dealer Goupil, for whom he painted landscapes and small, bright eighteenth-century genre scenes in the manner of Meissonier. His pictures of Parisian life with their centrifugal explosion of paint were equally popular. In 1874, Boldini exhibited for the first time to great public acclaim at the Salon du Champs- de-Mars, and, in the following years, travelled to Holland and Germany, further refining his style. It was at this time that he began to paint his celebrated portraits of the beautiful Society women of that wealthy, cosmopolitan world which gravitated towards Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. The sophisticated, artificial curves and exaggerated movement of his style, which reconciles the Mannerist tradition of his native Emilia with Art Nouveau, convey the evanescent magnificence of an era which was to be swept away by the First World War. His friends made up a roll-call of the major artists of the period: James McNeill Whistler; Paul César Helleu; John Singer Sargent; Edouard Manet; and Edgar Degas. Extremely versatile in many mediums, Boldini was active to the end of his long life.
Boldini was equally at ease with watercolour as he was with oil paint, as can be seen in this vibrant portrait. Painted on an undefined background of rapid and assured brush strokes of grey-brown and black watercolour, it shows a lady posing in profile, in an informal manner suggesting familiarity and restrained elegance. Her hair appears to be partly covered with a blue scarf which Boldini echoes with a dash of the same bright colour in contrast to the subdued tones used for the figure. Emma Bardac was in her early forties when Boldini painted this rather subtle portrait. Married at 17 to a banker, Sigismond Bardac, she was well-known for her beautiful singing voice and as an exceptional conversationalist. Following an affair with Gabriel Fauré, in 1904 she met and fell in love with Claude Debussy, a notoriously difficult man who abandoned his wife for her. To avoid further scandal, (Emma was then pregnant), the couple went to Jersey and then on to England where they lived in Eastbourne before returning to Paris, gaining divorces and buying a house on the Avenue Foch where they lived as a family until Debussy’s death in 1918. Their daughter, known as Chou-chou, was a great inspiration to Debussy.
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