Giovanni Boldini Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Giovanni Boldini was born in Ferrara, the child of a painter of religious subjects, and in 1862 went to Florence for a long time to study painting. He just occasionally went to classes at the Academy of Fine Arts, however, in Florence, he met other realist painters known as the Macchiaioli, who were the Italian forerunners to Impressionism. Their impact is found in Boldini's landscape scenes which demonstrate his unconstrained reaction to nature, even though it is for his portraits that he turned out to be best known.

Moving to London, Giovanni Boldini became successful as a portraitist. He finished portraits of important individuals from society including Lady Holland and the Duchess of Westminster. From 1872 he lived in Paris, where he became friends with Edgar Degas.

He likewise turned into the chicest portrait painter in Paris in the late nineteenth century, with a dashing style of painting which demonstrates some Macchiaioli impact and the style and the style of younger artists. Among the many portraits he did, he painter fellow artists John Singer Sargent, and James Abbott Mcneill Whistler.

Giovanni Boldini was selected magistrate of the Italian segment of the Paris Exposition in 1889 and got the Légion d'Honneur for this appointment.

A Giovanni Boldini picture of his lover Marthe de Florian, a French performer, was found in a Paris apartment in late 2010, concealed far from view on the premises that were empty for 70 years. The portrait has never been recorded, shown, or distributed and the flat belonged to de Florian's granddaughter who went to live in the South of France at the start of the Second World War and stayed away forever. An affection note and a personal reference to the work painted in 1888, when the actress was 24, solidified its authenticity. The full-length portrait of the same woman in a similar dress and embellishments, yet less provocative, hangs in the New Orleans Museum of Art.

The disclosure of his painting in the 70-years-empty apartment shapes the foundation to Michelle Gable's 2014 novel A Paris Apartment.

Giovanni Boldini is a character in the ballet Franca Florio, Regina di Palermo, written in 2007 by the Italian writer Lorenzo Ferrero, which portrays the tale of Donna Franca, a popular Sicilian blue-blood whose exceptional beauty inspired him and many other artists, musicians, poets, and emperors during the Belle Époque.

Art Movement: Academic, Macchiaioli.
He Traveled To England, France.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.