Cosmopolite and traveller, Giovanni Boldini (1842, Ferrara – 1931, Paris), after the first years of training spent in Tuscany, Paris and London, settled permanently in the French capital where he developed his own unmistakable style and became the most fashionable portrait painter of high society. His portraits are the peculiar image of Belle Époque cultural and historical period. But he was not only a portrait painter. His art ranges over different genres and techniques, from views to still-life, from painting to graphic.
The display brings together 54 pictures from seven Italian museums, including the Uffizi Gallery, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and museums in Parma, Barletta, Pavia and Treviso. The core of the retrospective, though, is formed by 37 exhibits from the Giovanni Boldini Museum in Ferrara, the largest public collection of the painter’s legacy, with a unique composition, comprising mainly works from his studio that he did not intend to present to the public, documenting the artist’s work in full and pointing out Boldini’s role in the renewal of Italian and international painting.
The display also features works by Italian artists of Boldini’s circle, his colleagues and friends – Cristiano Banti, Torello Ancillotti, Federico Zandomeneghi, Giuseppe De Nittis, Antonio Mancini, Filadelfo Simi, Paolo Troubetzkoy, including Vittorio Corcos’s famous painting Dreams.
A separate section of the exhibition is devoted to the Italian advertising placard of the early 20th-century, the Golden Age of the poster.