Giovanni Boldini’s Portrait of Madame de Florian

Portrait of Madame de Florian, by Giovanni Boldini (Italy) probably 1888

​Giovanni Boldini’s Portrait of Madame de Florien

The woman is pretty in pink, an ice cream cone or swirl of cotton candy under Giovanni Boldini’s brush. She is a whirlwind of cerise satin and soft lace, limbs and torso and upturned throat impossibly long. The viewer’s eyes follow her swan profile, the strong line of her nose, past the single gleaming rope of pearls adorning her tender decolletage.  Her slim fingers splay suggestively, invitingly, framing the mystery of her small, elegant breasts.  
Boldini, from Italy and working in Paris during the Belle Epoque, was a society portrait painter extraordinaire, known for his whirlwind, razzle-dazzle aesthetic, as if the beauty of his subjects was a kind of electricity. 

In 1933, Time Magazine crowned him the “master of swish” for this frenzied quality. Countless beautiful women of status hired the painter, and also became his lovers. He immortalized them in a whirling thrum of vivacity, attuned to the most enchanting aspects of their personalities and their sartorial splendour. And like his frenetic, slippery style, he himself was tough to pin down, a man with many models and muses, but no wife. Until he had finished painting, that is. At the age of 86, Boldini married Emilia Cardona, sixty years younger.

One particularly beautiful lover was Madame de Florian, the subject of the most famous painting of Boldini’s career. Its date of creation is widely contested, with sources pointing at a range of dates from 1888, when Marthe was 24 years old, to 1910, when she was in her forties. Whatever her age, Boldini’s passion and devotion was evident in every stroke. The portrait was a secret for at least a century. It was not seen until 2010, eighty years after the death of the artist.

Along with the painting, it was Marthe, too, who was forgotten. After her death in 1939, she drifted into obscurity in the mists of time. 

Initially a humble seamstress from a modest family, Marthe had been a great beauty from the Paris half-world, the society that lived in the twilight margins, at the fringe of respectable society. In the gilded world of the Belle Epoque, or “beautiful era,” before WW1, there was a parallel society in full swing, one that rejected the Victorian mores of the era, one that prized beauty, art, music, and pleasure above all.

It was a society of spectacle and indulgence, and the arts bloomed from the attention that wealthy patrons lavished on them. Fashion, too, blossomed. Haute Couture and French lingerie were ushered into the world on the bodies of the beautiful women mingling on display at operas and parties. The fluid, sensual curves of Art Nouveau embodied the era’s aesthetic in jewelry and wallpaper.

Marthe had two infants named Henri, “paternity unknown,” the first deceased at three months old. Legend says she was hired to repair garments for the legendary courtesan Cora Pearl, and grew fascinated with the demi-monde. She herself became a demimondaine whose beauty was widely pursued. If she was not quite at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of courtesans, the crème de la crème as it were, Marthe certainly held her own with several prime ministers as her patrons.

In the Belle Epoque, the courtesans were the queens. They ruled everything. These celebrities were known as “les grandes horizontales,” and grand they were, glittering in gorgeous gowns and jewels and silk stockings. But they were hardly “horizontal,” rather, women on top. They were prestigious, and did not associate themselves with the much more common streetwalkers or brothel attendants. Sadly, those impoverished women were quite literally a dime a dozen, in those times. While most of the grand courtesans came from humble origins, they competed for the wealthiest, most exclusive lovers, like men who owned businesses abroad or who lived in palaces. The courtesans expected to be established in mansions, furs, diamonds, carriages, and horses, with an eternal spigot for impulses and the finest Champagnes. 

And it wasn’t just about the money: these women were free to live on their own terms, love who they wished, travel, learn languages, attend the theatre, drink, and gamble. They wielded significant power as patrons of the arts, influencing tastes and becoming investors and collectors.

The courtesans achieved their ranks for a variety of reasons: skills in the art of seduction and the boudoir, of course, but perhaps their performances outside of the bedroom were much more important. Spectacle was key: the more flamboyant and luxurious her personality, the bigger her clients. Most essential was being good company. A good conversationalist was smart, witty, and well informed. These women learned independently about those things that interested them, especially art, music, history, and business.

Marthe’s portrait by a fashionable painter as lover was stunning but hardly unusual. If the courtesans were “kept” by wealthy gentlemen, artists in the era were “kept” by the courtesans who collected them and became their patrons. The women had some dependency on the painters, too, to ensure their likeness could be both looked at and preserved. 

What was unusual about the story of Marthe modelling was not her identity or her love affair with Boldini, but simply the way that the painting is a time capsule to another era, Marthe frozen like Sleeping Beauty for a hundred years, awakening in the age of Instagram to invite us backwards, to Paris and the golden age. 

Perhaps few visitors to her home after her retirement would have seen the greatest Boldini of them all. And certainly, Marthe had no idea when she died in 1939 that she would be resurrected, and that her story would be told in no less than four novels, capturing the public’s imagination. (The Paris Apartment, by Michelle Gable; Paris Time Capsule, by Ella Carey; The Paris Secret, by Karen Swan; The Velvet Hours, by Alyson Richman.) Certainly she would not have anticipated that her granddaughter, to whom she bequeathed her Paris apartment, would have to flee south to get away from the Nazis, or that the girl would never return but would pay the monthly rent for 70 years. It was only then, at the time of Marthe’s granddaughter’s death, that the rent went unpaid and the apartment entered into.

And inside, under decades of dust, was another world, another time. Marthe’s realm was untouched for seven decades. It was a world of endless mirrors, of fleurs de lis wallpaper in ivory and pale green, of magnificent candelabra and elaborate gold carved picture frames, of floral porcelain basins, of velvet cream coloured drapery, of chinoiserie pottery. A taxidermy ostrich, now quite dusty and dead, was once an exotic treasure of decadent opulence. 

And in the middle of all of it, the centrepiece, and the masterpiece. Boldini’s painting, valued now at three and a half million, leaving Marthe, too, untouched, infinite, resurrected, the goddess of the story. 

Lorette C. Luzajic