We were lucky enough to visit the major Boldini exhibition, held in the Petit Palais, Paris in the summer of 2022.  Boldini was famous as a fashionable portrait painter of Parisian High Society towards the end of the 19^th century.  Amidst more conventional portraits, his painting of Marchesa Luisa Casati (with peacock feathers, as opposed to with greyhound) is exquisite.  One of our all-time favourite pictures.

To depict such a colourful society figure, Boldini’s use of colour in the portrait is surprisingly muted; a muddy brown predominates; the Marchesa scarcely seeming able to free herself from an inchoate, encroaching obscurity, the accents of her peacock-feather headdress almost swallowed up in the surrounding gloom.  A bare shoulder; a slender forearm; long, tapering fingers; a shapely ankle; an angular face, captured in profile: all are emphasised by a brilliant light; bright points of frozen focus amidst a canvas in perpetual motion.  There is a restless nervous energy in the swirls of the Marchesa’s white dress; in the foreground scenery, where dreams writhe and crackle like small twigs being consumed by a fierce fire.

It is an unusual face.  Long, dark hair; large features; an expressive gaze.  Vulnerable.  Strangely vulnerable.  Perhaps Boldini was something of a visionary.

At the time that Boldini painted her portrait, Luisa, Marchesa Casati Stampa di Soncino was anything but vulnerable.  Italian heiress, patroness of the arts, she was notorious for her lavish parties; wild extravagances; myriad lovers; and eccentric behaviour.  She wore live snakes as items of jewellery and took pet cheetahs for walks on diamond-encrusted leashes.  Think Lady Gaga, Vivienne Westwood and Cher and you are not even halfway as outré.

Boldini painted her at the height of her decadence.  Less than two decades later, though, and all is change.

The Marchesa is no longer Paris’s most fashionable hostess.  She has used up her considerable fortune and run up debts to the tune of $25M, forcing her to sell off all her possessions.  She lived out the last quarter-century of her life in relative obscurity in a small flat in London, where she died in 1957 and was buried in Brompton Cemetery, where––a final ignominy––her name is misspelled as ‘Louisa’ on her tombstone.

Her tombstone also carries the Shakespearean quotation: ‘Age cannot wither her’.  Giovanni Boldini’s portrait stands as a visual reminder of that fact.

© Os Bros

Os Bros remain similarly unwithered.