«[...] those quivering, agitated women by Boldini, frenzied, hysterical and feverish […] happy and content in the pose of extreme imbalance in which the painter has placed them for an ephemeral eternity.”

The work’s illustrious provenance is due to its extraordinary quality of execution, despite the fact that it is a study with many parts left in a sketchy state on the possibly improvised support of an already partially painted canvas, cut by hand and placed on a new stretcher. Evidence of this is provided by the relining of the flaps of the canvas on the back and the layering of the brushstrokes, which are sometimes inconsistent with the studio vision of the nude and left visible as a demonstration of the utmost bravura. Transparencies, washy areas, drips and thicker applications of paint animate the surface of the work. While the reclining figure, her face and the curtains of the studio can only just be made out, the play of light on her fluttering skin is precisely captured. For the model’s sinuous and foreshortened pose, Rossella Campana recalls the popularity in France of the Louvre Antiope by Correggio, which became a lofty model of eroticism in literature and the figurative arts in the second half of the 19th century.¹ A typical example of the soft and sensual nude in the Correggio style is provided by the Danae shown by Carolus-Duran at the Salon in 1891 (fig. 1), which is an eloquent stylistic comparison for Giovanni Boldini’s study that can therefore be dated in those same years. The vigorous handling of anatomy exemplifies what Pier Maria Bardi felicitously described as Boldini’s “serpentinism” in a posthumous study published in 1989: “the liana, the last remaining, propitious, eastern flower of the triumphal exoticism of mid-period romanticism, is embodied in those quivering, agitated women by Boldini, frenzied, hysterical and feverish […] happy and content in the pose of extreme imbalance in which the painter has placed them for an ephemeral eternity.”² 

The work first belonged to Guillaume de Gontaut-Biron (1859-1939), a marquis of ancient lineage, art lover and dealer, as well as the last owner of the Château de Biron in the Dordogne. His collection included works of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, most of which were auctioned in 1914, as well as a set of drawings by Tiepolo and Guardi bought by the Metropolitan, New York, in 1937. Boldini’s correspondence suggests that he met the Marquis at the turn of the century. The portrait he painted in 1900 and the fact that the Marquis owned about fifteen of his works around 1905³ is evidence of close contact and a relationship of patronage. 

The Marquis retained possession of the canvas until 1938, when it was auctioned at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris and made its way into noble collections in Geneva, first in the Château d’Allaman and then in the Château de Penthes. From 1950 to 1972, the latter housed the collection of Louis Birkigt, son of the manufacturer of Hispano-Suiza automobiles. In the early 1980s it came into the hands of the British baronet Sir Valentine Abdy, curator of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and administrator of the Museé des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. A group of important works by Boldini from his collection, including this canvas, was auctioned in New York in 1990. The Nudo sdraito (Reclining Nude) is the last and most important work of Boldini’s purchased by Cerruti, who bought it at an auction in Paris in 1999. 

Filippo Bosco

¹ “Already taken up as a model in painting by Watteau, Pierre and Ingres, and included among the ideals of beauty by Théophile Gautier in his programmatic novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, this was a titillating point of reference for the Goncourt brothers in the description of the model and heroine of their Manette Salomon. It also made an appearance of aggressive charm in Charles Baudelaire’s Les Bijoux, a poem in the collection Les Epaves, withdrawn from Les Fleurs du mal for obscenity, where the poet uses this image of piercing eroticism as a point of reference in describing his beloved” (R. Campana, in Rome 2009-10, p. 216).

² M. Bardi, “Da ‘Boldini e il suo tempo’”, in Milan 1989, p. 50.

³ “These subjects, certain nudes and some flowers (above all in the collection of the Marquis de Biron, where about fifteen Boldinis hang beside masterpieces) demonstrate that the artist is far superior to his occasional motifs” (Mauclair 1905, p. 152, my translation).