Giovanni Boldini was an Italian painter, born in Ferrara in 1842, who settled in Paris in 1871 and died there in 1931, aged 88. For decades he painted the women, dandies and artists of Belle Epoque society in fast, whipping strokes, and a 1933 article in Time gave him the nickname people still use, the Master of Swish.
He is remembered for a pastel of the composer Giuseppe Verdi, for the Marchesa Luisa Casati in a headdress of peacock feathers, and for a portrait of a courtesan that sat in a locked Paris apartment for seventy years.
Paris queued to sit for him. When he died, the New York Times wrote that a portrait by Boldini was a crowning event of the social season.
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The sitters were not always grateful. In 1897 he painted James McNeill Whistler, the most quarrelsome painter of his day, in black evening dress and top hat, with a monocle raised to one eye and a cane running out of the frame. Whistler disliked it.
His dealer Edward Kennedy, who was in the room for the last sitting, reported that Whistler hoped he did not look like that, and that he had always wanted to be shown as a man over six feet tall with the bearing of a major general. Whistler was short.
John Singer Sargent, the other star portraitist of the age, saw it differently. He called it "a first rate Boldini and a wonderful picture of Whistler" and recommended it to the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, who did not buy it.
Another of Boldini's sitters, a courtesan named Marthe de Florian, is the reason his name made headlines in 2010. Her portrait had hung for seventy years in a Paris apartment that no one had entered since 1940.
What You'll Discover
Why a painter's son left Ferrara.
Who made Paris queue for him.
Why a composer sat for him twice.
Which sitter hated the result.
What was left in a locked flat.
Who he married at the very end.