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Description

Giovanni BOLDINI (Ferrare 1842 - Paris 1931)

Portrait of the wife of Jules Amigues, 1867 Original oil on canvas 37 x 22.5 cm In a wood and gilded stucco frame, front label BOLDINI A certificate from Madame Francesca Dini will be given to the buyer. The portrait is of Marie-Laure-Elina De Muller, married to Jules Amigues (Perpignan 1828-Paris 1883), a Bonapartist writer, jurist and politician. The couple had two sons, Georges (1856-1921), illustrator and caricaturist under the pseudonym "Japhet", and Jacques, contributor to the Bonapartist newspaper "Petit Caporal" and founder of the insurance company "La Préservatrice". Having belonged to Jacques and then to his son Maurice Amigues, the painting has been passed down to the present owners. On the upper part of the frame, an old inscription in pen reads: "Mme Jules Amigues/ by Giovanni Boldini/ Florence 1867". [...] Giovanni Boldini, an Italian painter, was immersed in an artistic environment from an early age. Following his training in his native city (which was nurtured by the example of important old masters such as Cosmé Tura and Dosso Dossi), he settled in Florence for around ten years, where, from 1864 onwards, he took part in the great poetic season of the Macchiaioli. In 1871, seduced by the Parisian lifestyle, he decided to settle in the French capital [...] and became one of the most sought-after artists in the Goupil stable. He achieved success with small paintings of extraordinary beauty and craftsmanship, sometimes depicting gallant scenes in 18th-century costumes, sometimes elegant slices of life, where the liveliness of the rococo brushstroke is applied to the reality of the modern metropolis. In the 1880s, Boldini returned to portraiture, his youthful passion, depicting the characters of his time in the large-format paintings that made him internationally famous. Long before his enduring fame as a "worldly portraitist" and emblematic painter of the Belle Époque, Boldini had spent just under a decade in Florence as part of the Macchiaioli movement, influenced by them on the rare occasions when he tried his hand at landscape painting. But from 1864 onwards, Boldini devoted himself above all to renewing the portrait genre, inventing a typology destined to spread among his fellow Macchiaioli, who followed him in the quest to capture the attitudes of the portrait subjects - most often full-length - and the environments they actually inhabited. In this way, studio interiors, living rooms and bedrooms became little optical boxes full of details that recounted and made visible aspects of the social life and character of his characters. The present painting belongs to this creative moment, depicting Jules Amigues' wife at a time when the famous politician was making his journalistic debut in Italy as a correspondent for "Le Temps", mingling assiduously with the cosmopolitan society that gathered in the Florentine hills of Bellosguardo and in particular in the splendid Villa dell'Ombrellino - inhabited at the time by the eccentric artist Marcellin Desboutin. It was here that Boldini and Amigues became acquainted, involved in various ways with Desboutin and publisher Felice Solar's plan to create a French-language newspaper in Tuscany. What's more, in 1867, the year our painting was created, the Amigues family and Boldini were staying in Castiglioncello - on the coast, south of Livomo - as guests of Diego Martellì, the art critic and friend of the Macchiaioli and later the Impressionists [see Piero Dini - Francesca Dini, "Giovanni Boldini. Catalogo ragionato", Allemandi, Turin 2002, volume II (Epistolario), p. 26]. The present painting depicts the slender silhouette of Madame Amigues against a dark green background, illuminated at the bottom by the red and orange tones of the carpet, evoking the warmth of a bourgeois interior. Madame Amigues wears a rich jet-trimmed black gown, the line of which recalls that of a simplified crinoline fashionable in the late 1860s; refined white lace covers her wrists and neck, beneath which a wide veiled bow unfurls over her bosom in a light, luminous hue. With her brown hair parted on the forehead and divided into headbands, the model's face turns to our right, a restrained movement that Boldini is quick to capture: Madame Amigues thus appears posed, without being motionless, while the Italian master reveals his characteristic style through an elegant and fascinating execution. By Francesca Dini, expert on the works of Giovanni Boldini. Reviewed and translated by Etude Millon

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Giovanni BOLDINI (Ferrare 1842 - Paris 1931)

Estimate 8 000 - 10 000 EUR

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For sale on Tuesday 25 Jun : 14:30 (CEST)
paris, France
Millon
+33147279534

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