Study for portrait of a lady

Originally found on the verso of the painting Interior of the atelier with the portrait of little Subercaseaux;
inventoried by Emilia Cardona with number 36B bis of Atelier Boldini.

Bibliography: Boldini. Catalogo ragionato, edited by P. Dini, F. Dini, Allemandi, Turin 2004, no. 741, p. 401; B. Doria, Giovanni Boldini. Catalogo generale dagli archivi Boldini, Milan, Rizzoli, 2000, no. 398.

Study for Portrait of a Lady by Giovanni Boldini is an oil on panel painting that is particularly interesting for its history and for a pen inscription on the back of the work, signed by his wife, the journalist Emilia Cardona. The inscription reads: ‘This study for the Portrait of a Lady Franca Florio, a work by Giovanni Boldini executed around 1901, belongs to Signor Luigi Condorelli. July 1968′. The sentence, brief and incisive, clearly illustrates Cardona’s opinion that this panel represents a very rare study of the iconic Portrait of the woman Franca Florio, commissioned by the so-called Queen of Sicily in 1901 and later dated 1924. A painting with a troubled and fascinating history, it would find its origin, according to Emilia Cardona, precisely in this small but precious profile of a woman.

Inventoried by her with the number 36B bis in Boldini’s atelier, it was initially on the reverse of the painting Interior of the atelier with the Portrait of little Subercaseaux, executed around 1899 and conserved in the Giovanni Boldini Museum in Ferrara. The impetuous and rapid brushstrokes, with oblique and jerky trajectories and a light, fluttering pictorial material, surround the lady’s face like water vapour, the only fixed point emerging from the ebony white of her elegant profile and her dark hair, gathered into a high chignon, like that of the final painting by Franca Florio. From the study emerges the base of the table and the choice of an essential chromatism of black and white tones.

It was in the 1980s that the author’s stylistic signature crystallised, with painterly gestures that seem to follow the pressing rhythm and social whirl of the Ville lumière, especially in the female portraits. Everything takes place in his studio on boulevard Berthier, a real crossroads of artists, friends, critics, collectors, a mundane space and at the same time pulsating with life, full of objects, instruments, paintings, sculptures: this panel is therefore evidence of Boldini’s continuous inventions, pictorial experimentation, studies, stylistic progress in his lively atelier, represented on the front of the panel. Here, among other objects that can be deciphered in the unbridled dynamism of the brushstroke and through the ray of light striking Bernini’s plaster sculpture, one can recognise the iconic Portrait of Little Subercaseaux, executed in 1891.

The two paintings on the verso and recto are symbolic of a specific stylistic and biographical phase for Boldini, in which the figures portrayed in the studio emerge from dark or neutral backdrops and are outlined with a few quick, fluid touches that allude to space and physical details. The Studio per il ritratto di signora (Study for a Portrait of a Lady ) in particular is a vivid demonstration of the artist’s changeable and impermanent pictorial research, made up of observations, preparatory stages, but also of instinct and virtuosity. It is almost the definition of the Boldini canon in a female study, highlighting the serpentine line and elongation of the figure deduced from a profound knowledge of the Tuscan and Emilian Mannerist tradition, but also a sensitivity to the movement of modern life, with its contrasting tones, subdued lighting and exuberant beauty.

Elena Lago