Ballerine Spagnole al Moulin Rouge

No artist captured the glamour, energy and optimism of the Parisian Belle Époque better than the Italian master Giovanni Boldini. After leaving his native Italy for the French capital in 1871, Boldini enjoyed meteoric success, attracting the support of the city's influential dealer Adolphe Goupil as well as its most esteemed members of high society. Among those who sat for the celebrated painter were Marchesa Luisa Casati, Consuelo Vanderbilt the Duchess of Marlborough, Count Robert de Montesquieu, Giuseppe Verdi and many other cultural and societal luminaries. Boldini rendered his subjects with a verve and bravado that distinguishes his work from the era’s other well-known portraitists, such as John Singer Sargent and Joaquín Sorolla. His signature style is characterized by energetic brushwork that loosely coalesces to capture the swishing fabric of the era’s fashions and the spirit and character of his illustrious sitters. Almost vibrating with energy, his canvases convey a sense of movement, atmosphere, and immediacy not found in more traditional portraits.
While best remembered for its elegance, La Belle Époque was also an era of profound cultural and social change, a time when the Parisian salons of the élite were populated not just by aristocrats but increasingly with the artists, dancers, musicians and coquettes of the demi-monde. If Marcel Proust and Emile Zola caught this twilight world in words, Boldini captured it in paint. Nowhere was this blurring of class boundaries more apparent than at the famous Moulin Rouge, the setting for the present work, which opened in 1889 and quickly became one of the hot spots of Parisian nightlife for patrons from all walks of life. There one could find denizens of the city’s most elegant arrondissements rubbing shoulders with the bohemian crowd of nearby Montmartre.
Though the identity of the 'Ballerine Spagnole' who is the subject of the present painting has never been formally confirmed, it is possible that she is Rosita Mauri, the most important Spanish prima ballerina of the 19th century and a popular subject for artists including Degas, Manet, Renoir and Zorn. If in fact the sitter is Rosita Mauri, her positioning in the Getty’s living room - with her back turned to Jacques-Émile Blanche’s masterful portrait of the great Ballets Russes dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, was particularly apt. Said to have had a fiery temper, Mauri refused to eat caviar after an incident when the Tsar once turned to speak to a companion while she was performing for him. It’s also possible that the dancer is Anita de la Feria, another Spanish dancer active in Paris who Boldini painted on several occasions in 1900.
Whoever this daring figure is, her commanding presence is on full display in Boldini's depiction. Her head turned haughtily to the side, the dark-haired beauty emphasizes her delicate profile and long neck, around which she has tied a broad black ribbon, while turning her daringly low-cut décolletage toward the viewer. Her distinctive black lace mantilla is also on full-display in profile view; rising dramatically over a tall peineta comb, the lace cascades alluringly over her hair and shoulders. But it is her dress which is a tour-de-force of Boldini’s characteristic swirling brushwork. Large areas of the fabric are applied in fluid, sweeping passages of color, and the details of the dress are created by overlaying rapidly applied strokes of black paint to give the dress both structure and depth. As detailed as the swift hatches that create the patterned overlay of the figure’s sleeve are, Boldini’s characteristic kinetic brushstrokes also soften the edges of the figure, so that in places it is not entirely clear where she ends and the room around her begins.
Fittingly dark, and energetically rendered in Boldini’s dazzling hand, the swirling energy of the Moulin Rouge surrounds the figure - evoking the essence of the dim and bustling cabaret without the need to depict the crowd which surrounds the figure, save for the sketchily rendered figure who sits next to her. The painterly flash of the swiftly applied background is highlighted by a few touches of white, which evoke the lights of the Moulin Rouge. Though the dancer is seated and clearly a spectator at the performance, the strong lighting which starkly illuminates her creamy complexion against the dark background, and her primacy on the canvas, do capture the presence this dancer must have had as a performer as well. Adding to the drama of the scene is Boldini's distinctive plunging perspective, one of the innovative hallmarks of the artist's mature oeuvre.
Through her swirling dress, twisting body and broadly rendered background, the figure of the Ballerine Spagnole ripples with energy. An almost dizzying spiral of flesh and fabric, Ballerine Spagnole al Moulin Rouge affirms Boldini’s central place among La Belle Époque’s most important painters and is an extraordinary example of why the famed Ballets Russes choreographer Serge Lifar called the artist the 'magician of movement'.