Giovanni Boldini was an Italian painter, born in Ferrara on December 31, 1842. He settled in Paris in 1871 and died there on January 11, 1931, aged 88.
For decades he painted the women, dandies and artists of the Belle Epoque, the prosperous years in Paris before the First World War. His fast, sweeping strokes leave a skirt looking as if it were still moving, which is why he is still called the Master of Swish.
People look him up for three pictures: the pastel of the composer Giuseppe Verdi, the Marchesa Luisa Casati in a headdress of peacock feathers, and the portrait of a courtesan found in a Paris apartment in 2010.
Paris queued to sit for him, and a portrait by Boldini became a crowning event of the social season. Some sitters hated what he saw in them, though, and one of his best known portraits spent decades behind a locked door.
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None of that glamour was in sight in Ferrara, where he grew up the eighth of thirteen children. His father, Antonio, was a painter trained in a pious, old-fashioned style at the Accademia di San Luca, the old academy of painters in Rome. His mother, Benvenuta Caleffi, was devout.
Giovanni drew before he could read or write. He left school early to work at his father's side, and at fourteen he painted the self-portrait above. By then the small city had little more to teach him.
An inheritance from an uncle paid for the move to Florence, around 1862. He enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, the city's official art school, but found the teaching too rigid and soon left. His evenings went to the Caffè Michelangiolo instead.
That café was where the Macchiaioli met, a group of Tuscan painters who built their pictures from patches of light and color. Boldini sat at their tables, and in summer he followed them to Castiglioncello on the coast, where their friend and critic Diego Martelli had an estate.
He took their loose handling of paint, but he never quite joined the group. Landscape was their ground, and portraits interested him more.
Florence also led him out of Italy. The Falconers, an English family, received him at their villa near Pistoia, and Isabella Falconer became his lover and commissioned many works from him.
In 1867 the Falconers took him to the Exposition Universelle, the world's fair held in Paris that year, and he saw the city for the first time. Over the official stars of the day, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Ernest Meissonier, he preferred the young painters of the Batignolles district, Edgar Degas above all.
England came next. A patron invited him to London and opened the houses of the English aristocracy to him. Portrait commissions followed.
In 1871 Boldini settled in Paris for good. He took rooms and a studio on the place Pigalle, at the foot of the hill of Montmartre, opposite a café where the future Impressionists met every evening. That café was about to give him his first friends in the city.
What You'll Discover
Who came to sit in his studio.
Why a composer sat for him twice.
What Whistler said about his portrait.
Which magazine gave him his nickname.
What hung in a flat locked since 1940.
Whom he married at 86.