Page 24 - G19C Opening Catalogue

Giovanni Boldini

PARIS TYPES: A STUDY OF TWO WOMEN, c. 1878

This early example of Boldini’s emphatic and expressive brushwork
demonstrates the painter’s formative attempts to represent the
tenor of contemporary life—a preoccupation that he adopted after
moving to Paris in 1871 and then developed throughout the decade.
Works such as this speak to his Impressionist-like fascination with
honing an artistic technique that might convey the effects of speed,
steam, bustling streets, and anonymity in the rapidly-modernizing
city rather than more traditional Academic subjects. In this
painting, Boldini offers up swiftly-executed studies of two of the
industrialized city’s most recognizable urban types—the laundress
and the fashionably-dressed Parisienne. The dissociated arrangement
of the figures combines with his use of variegated painterly facture
and fragments of linear, infrastructural elements such as bridges and
buildings to convey the feeling that while the women are not united
to one another, indeed they are inseparable from, and anonymously
dissolve into, the fevered texture of the modern city.

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