Montesquiou by Boldini
The older among us have not forgotten the “Profil d’une œuvre” collection (Hatier ed.) that gave to the schoolchildren we were the minimum amount of information on great literary works to make our teachers think that we had read the works concerned. Summarising the works and placing them and their author in their historical context, it offered us an overview of the works, which we could quickly understand – even if it was inevitably more superficial than reading the original opus. The portrait of the Count of Montesquiou exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay inspired us to take the opposite but the same approach.
Along with those of Giuseppe Verdi and Olivia Concha de Fontecilla (his famous “Lady in Rose”), Montesquiou is undoubtedly Giovanni Boldini’s most famous painting. It was in 1897 that the Italian artist was asked to paint a portrait of the Count. He was then, along with John Singer Sargent, the most prominent social portraitist in Paris, and enjoyed an international reputation. His canvases, depicting the women of the French and British aristocracies of the Belle Epoque, are renowned for their fidelity to the model and for his ability to bring out the model’s beauty with the grace of both inspired brushstrokes and technical mastery resulting from studies in Paris, London and Florence.
A mutual friend, Madame Veil-Picard, introduces the two men. Accustomed to immortalizing the most illustrious personalities (he already owes him portraits of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who with a fortune equivalent to 185 billion dollars today is then the richest man in the world, Cleo de Merode and the composer Giuseppe Verdi), the portraitist was seduced by the prospect of painting the descendant of D’Artagnan, whom the whole of Paris considers to be a modern incarnation of the Baudelairean dandy and an incomparable aesthete.
When he sets to work on this, Boldini is at the height of his glory. Born in 1842 in Ferrara, he began studying painting there under the tutelage of his father, a painter himself (he is suspected of having committed some rather successful imitations of Raphael and Guardi…) before completing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence at the age of twenty. He joined the academy, preceded by an already enviable reputation as a portraitist, and made decisive friendships with those who would form the Macchiaioli group (which, by breaking with Romanticism and Neoclassicism, would give birth to modern Italian painting), including Michele Gordigiani, who would introduce him to various international patrons, including William and Isabelle Falconer. Leaving landscapes and impressionist inspiration to his co-religionists, he was more inspired by the Flemish masters of the 18th century. As soon as he finished his studies, the Falconers, who had become friends with him, invited him to stay at their Tuscan estate, Villa Falconiera, and commissioned a series of landscape frescoes from him, before he was able to return to his native Italy.
to invite him to visit the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition, where he met Degas, Manet and Sisley. Observing the works of these masters would lead him to fluidify his style, and soon allow him to be consecrated Master of Swish in the artistic microcosm. Two years later, another member of the Falconer family invited him to come to London to meet the most renowned portrait painters. This stay was decisive: making the most of it, Boldini painted his first portraits of British high society women, which opened the doors to the most exclusive evenings and earned him numerous commissions, forcing him to regularly travel across the Channel from then on. 1872 saw him settle in Paris, in a studio near the Place Pigalle. He was represented there by the art dealer Adolphe Goupil, who skilfully raised his prices and soon allowed him to make a decent living from his art. A trip to Holland in 1875 enabled him to discover Frans Hals, which was the third decisive encounter of his career: the Dutch Baroque painter was indeed one of the most renowned portrait painters of the 16th century and his paintings are known for the expressiveness of his models (among the most famous are the portrait of Descartes in the Louvre Museum and the portrait of the Mardi Gras revellers in the Metropolitan Museum in New York). For Boldini this was a striking discovery, which led him to refine his brushstrokes, to make his portraits even more realistic and to strengthen both the admiration they aroused and his own notoriety. During the second half of the decade he became one of the most sought-after portraitists in Paris. A close friend of Degas, he was a member of the now legendary community of Montmartre painters of the 1870s and 1880s, although he distinguished himself by the very rich social life associated with his status as a portrait painter of Parisian high society. The latter was pleased with the consecration he received with the gold medal at the 1889 Universal Exhibition, for the portrait of Emilia Concha de Ossa (now in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan).
During the last part of his life, Giovanni Boldini saw his eyesight fail and painted less and less. He died in Paris in 1931, at the age of 90, when photography had definitively taken over from painting to immortalise the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy.
As he did with the many women of the world whose portraits he painted, Boldini was able to capture and reproduce the most salient features of Robert de Montesquiou’s personality. The fine, hieratic features of the face, the somewhat rigid body, the legendary elegance of his clothing… These are all traits of character enhanced by the artist’s personal touch, which, by having his model hold his cane like a sceptre, both underlines Montesquiou’s compassed intransigence and suggests that the figure already belongs to another era. And it definitively refers him back to the worldly insolence that made him proclaim himself “sovereign of transitory things” to Marcel Proust, who made him the model of the Baron de Charlus de La Recherche, an insignia of honour among all others.