Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris, which accompanies the eponymous exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, provides an English-speaking audience an essential framework with which to place this scarcely known artist. The catalogue, written by Sarah Lees with contributions from Richard Kendall and Barbara Guidi, distinguishes itself from typical studies of Boldini (1842–1931) by examining and illustrating the full range of his work stylistically and thematically. Its format, organized largely by genre, is vividly supported by dozens of color plates, and illustrates Boldini’s explorations both in relation to his French environment after 1871 and his earlier Italian one. Lees, in her opening essay, compares individual works by Boldini to Impressionist compositions, revealing a stylistic dialogue instead of a dependence on French examples. Although the Clark exhibition’s inclusion of the phrase “in Impressionist Paris” in its title may imply an assimilation of the French style, the catalogue is more expansive, going beyond Parisian influences to include Florentine ones and beyond the Impressionist period to the early twentieth century.

The catalogue’s strength is the organization of its visual material. Its focus on genre may seem systematic and predictable, but given the usual identification of Boldini with stylized portraiture, what results is critical divergence and reevaluation. In comparison with the swell of Boldini scholarship that has appeared during the last decade, including Piero and Francesca Dini’s catalogue raisonné (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 2002), or the Paduan catalogue Boldini (Venice: Marsilio, 2003), this book champions the painter’s breadth of exploration and individual solutions in a way that is less obvious elsewhere. In her opening essay, Lees, writing for an audience unfamiliar with nineteenth-century Italian, or Ottocento art, presents a variety of interpretive tools for understanding Boldini’s work, up until now unavailable outside of Italian or French publications. Among these are previously unpublished documents confirming Boldini’s association with the Goupil gallery. Although little new ground is covered after the exhaustive work of the last decade by the Dinis, Carlo Sisi, and Fernando Mazzocca, the English-speaking reader will discover a complexity and richness in an artist all too often written off for his polish.

As Mazzocca recounts in his 2003 study of critical reception (Venice: Marsilio, 2003), past scholars have identified Boldini as a chronicler of the Belle Epoque, known for his luscious and flattering portraits constructed from distinctive brushwork that in previous decades was seen as signs of fin-de-siècle decadence. He was frequently dismissed, even by his contemporaries, for a slavish devotion to aristocratic culture, to fashion instead of truth. His brushwork has been variously described as deconstructive and dematerializing, and his paintings as ecstatic or chic.

More recent and revisionary scholarship tends to place Boldini in one of two ways: as an Impressionist aspirant limited in his understanding of modernist styles emerging in Paris, or as a lost Italian out of touch with his realist roots. Significant efforts to reevaluate Boldini have benefitted from the now-established narrative of Tuscan Realists known as the Macchiaioli. His very direct connection with the movement has only been more recently fleshed out in Italian publications, and comprehensive studies reveal his personal and working relationships with the Tuscan painters Telemaco Signorini and Cristiano Banti. Although these artists are still mostly unfamiliar to English-speaking art historians, they provide a foundation, if not a touchstone, for further study on artists who stayed in Italy (Gioacchino Toma, Antonio Mancini) and on those who left (Boldini, Federico Zandomeneghi).

Undertaking an English-language survey of a nineteenth-century Italian painter, especially an ex-patriot Italian, is a daunting task due to the obscurity of many of the Ottocento artists. Compounded with Boldini’s sporadic exhibition record—many of his portraits went directly to patrons in England and the United States, and many of his smaller, more experimental works never left his studio—his relative anonymity often leads to critical inconsistency and repeated misrepresentation. Lees acknowledges this critical ambiguity by quoting the Macchiaioli and Impressionist champion Diego Martelli who wrote “to describe the talent of this artist is a more than difficult task” (43). To many scholars, tour de force works like the Brooklyn Museum’s Portrait of James McNeill Whistler (1897) or the Musée d’Orsay’s Count Robert de Montesquiou (1897), both completed with exaggerated brushwork in the fashionable, French manner, embody the extent of Boldini’s achievements. Lees proceeds in a more complex and informed way. In so doing, the artist is recognized as being expansive in his understanding of finish, movement, and setting, and drawing from a variety of artistic influences.

Richard Kendall continues to broaden the understanding of Boldini’s versatility in his essay “Drawing Paris: Boldini as a Draftsman in the 1870s.” Although earlier publications have examined Boldini’s graphic work, most particularly Dini’s catalogue of drawings and ephemera in the archives of the Casa Banti (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1989), Kendall’s essay concentrates on the period of transition between Florence and Paris, before Boldini’s commitment to portraiture. He not only reveals the vast wealth of drawings, many found in the Museo Giovanni Boldini in Ferrara, but also the “largely independent character of Boldini’s graphic oeuvre” (81). This includes, as Kendall shows, both inquisitive and spontaneous studies from life—most of which are not preparatory studies—as well as more finished compositions mirroring the energy of his paintings (see, for example, Woman at a Mirror, Seen from Behind as She Fixes her Hat, n.d.). Kendall ends his essay with Boldini’s drawing of Edgar Degas (1885–90), highlighting its similarity to the Impressionists’ mastery of spontaneous brushstroke and dynamic composition.

Boldini’s personal reputation is not treated in the Clark catalogue nearly as much as his artistic development. In his case, however, they are integrally connected. Lees’s and Guidi’s decision to limit biographical discussion detracts from their argument at certain points, leaving the analysis at times a bit detached. There is little sense of Boldini’s enormous personality here, his directness and impulsiveness. Yet his personal interaction with patrons and subjects did affect his stylistic decisions considerably. This becomes clear when portraits from the same periods shift dramatically in style. A telling comparison exists between his portrait of the socialite Countess Gabrielle de Rasty (1879) and his Portrait of Cecilia de Madrazo Fortuny painted two years later. The Rasty portrait is particularly flattering, and Lees describes Boldini’s “rare ability” to indicate mood through “an innovative style that conveys unusual vitality through small hints of movement” (158). More could be said, though, about the artist’s intimate relationship with the sitter, his interest in widening his social circle through Rasty, and the high marketability of these portraits. Recent critics, specifically Carlo Lega, recognize a sense of irony in these works, suggesting Boldini’s cynical attitude underlying the more elegant portraits (Ferrarra: Corbo Editore, 1994).

In contrast to the Rasty portrait, Boldini’s depiction of Cecilia de Madrazo Fortuny, the wife and sister of two close colleagues, reflects an artistic treatment more penetrating than superficial. Rather than the seductiveness of the Countess, Boldini paints the sitter’s direct gaze and stately stature. Lees describes the portrait as “among his highest achievements of the period” (158), but does not suggest the personal motivation or market reality responsible for the break from his typical approach. The sincerity and subtlety of the Fortuny portrait is infrequent in Boldini’s oeuvre, attesting to the market success of the stylized, flattering brushwork of his better-known work. The simplicity and presence of the Fortuny image, on the other hand, speaks to the psychological rather than the physical or fashionable, which is mostly downplayed in the catalogue for the sake of analytical distance.

This focus on stylistic development is more effective in the section on landscape painting, a genre that usually does not come to mind when considering Boldini. Yet in his compositions Fisherman (ca. 1880) and The Machine at Marly (ca. 1876), his interpretations are fresh and spontaneous, borrowing the intimate, modern subject from both the Macchiaioli and the Impressionists, but never relinquishing a high finish and areas of precise focus. Guidi describes Boldini’s facility in both the “luminosity and freshness of treatment,” but also his ability to produce a “finished, detailed, and descriptive technique” (131). Because of their diminutive scale, these works easily get lost in earlier catalogues, which usually are dominated by glamorized portraits or costume scenes of eighteenth-century court life. Some of Boldini’s smaller landscapes and genre scenes, appearing as they do here, unexpectedly punctuate a career that is often presented far too narrowly.

Although at times both Lees and Guidi overstate Boldini’s interest in realism, as when Guidi describes a passage from The Morning Stroll (1873) as “an exquisitely realist passage in the style of Millet” (130), the careful and broad presentation acknowledges his accomplishments beyond the usual focus. The book leaves the reader with a detailed view of an artist tied to his times, but independent in outlook, and capable of fine artistic achievement in a variety of styles and subjects.