Giovanni Boldini belonged to the Macchiaioli group during his early period in Tuscany from 1864 to 1871. Although he preferred the company of the wealthy Cristiano Banti to bohemian life and took part in none of the campaigns of the wars for Italian independence, he was present at their gatherings in haunts like the Caffè Michelangiolo and Marcellin Desboutin’s Villa dell’Ombrellino, and he was one of the first to go and stay with Diego Martelli at Castiglioncello. Like Abbati, Fattori and Signorini, he addressed the subjects of landscape and the handling of light very early. Vague traces of Tuscan painting en plein air can be detected beneath the later Impressionist approach in this study of countryside, datable to the late 1890s. Painting in the open air was indeed facilitated by the use of an easily transportable support, similar to the predella-like panels of the Macchiaioli. The quick, light brushstrokes are, however, a far cry from smooth tonalism of the Italian painters. 

It is hard to date the work. While the dating put forward by Piero Dini is accepted here, Bianca Doria suggests that it was produced about ten years earlier. It is, however, interesting to note that it has a “twin” in Contadina che raccoglie l’erba, which can perhaps be regarded as painted on the same day on the basis of viewpoint, execution and colour.¹ In any case, these small panels were used by Boldini on a number of occasions, not least for Canale a Venezia, another work in the Cerruti Collection (the number 3 stamped on the back of both works may refer to the production model, cat. p. 588). The measurements are between the industrial standards for landscape and seascape canvases (respectively 27 x 19 cm and 27 x 16 cm). The elevated viewpoint and the way the depiction of the horsewoman in the foreground ends abruptly at the waist are unprecedented elements. The colt’s movement is rendered with a few strokes and the brown of the support is deliberately left exposed is numerous areas of the landscape. 

After the artist’s death and the sale of the works in the studio, the panel remained in the possession of his widow, Emilia Cardona, until the late 1960s at least. They had met when she interviewed him as a journalist for the Turinese newspaper Gazzetta del Popolo in 1926 and married in 1929, when he was nearly eighty. The huge collection left to her is housed in the Villa Falconiera near Pistoia, which she bought in 1938 after discovering the frescoes of rural life painted there by Boldini for Isabella Falconer seventy years before. 

The art-historical and critical rediscovery of Boldini began in 1963 with the retrospective held first in the illustrious Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris and then at the Casa Romei in his hometown Ferrara, consisting primarily of works from the Cardona Collection. Before his death the year before, Jean-Gabriel Domergue, director of the Jacquemart-André and a former pupil of Boldini, announced the return to Paris of one of its forgotten figures: “Boldini revient à Paris.” The panel can be seen in a photo of the exhibition in the room devoted to landscapes (fig. 1). In 1979, two years after Emilia Cardona’s death, the work was authenticated by Vito Doria, her former assistant and now director of the Centro Studi Boldiniani. Between the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001 Bianca Dora, the author of the catalogue raisonné of Boldini, visited Cerruti with a copy of the volume and some paintings. Among them the collector chose to buy Il cavallino bianco (The White Horse). 

Filippo Bosco

¹ Doria 2000, no. 226.