Portrait of Cecilia de Madrazo Fortuny

Giovanni Boldini · 1881 · oil on canvas

The painting

Boldini painted Cecilia de Madrazo Fortuny in Paris in 1881, four years after the death of her husband, the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny y Marsal. The portrait belongs to a transitional phase in Boldini's portraiture — before the highly mannered swept brushwork of his Belle Époque celebrity pictures, and after the Macchiaioli-tinged studies of his Florentine years.

Cecilia stands in three-quarter view against a dark, atmospheric ground. Boldini gives her a contained, slightly melancholic dignity rather than the theatrical glamour that would later define his portraits of the Marchesa Casati or Madame Charles Max. The handling of black silk and lace is meticulous; the face is built up in pale, almost luminous flesh tones with rapid touches of cool shadow around the eyes and temples.

About the sitter

Cecilia de Madrazo Fortuny (Madrid, 1841 — Venice, 1932) was the daughter of the Spanish painter Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz, then director of the Prado, and sister to the painter Raimundo de Madrazo. She married Mariano Fortuny y Marsal in 1867. After his sudden death in 1874 she became the steward of his vast studio collection and the mother of Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, the celebrated Venetian designer of fabrics and theatrical lighting.

The Madrazo family was the most important Spanish artistic dynasty of the nineteenth century, and Cecilia moved between Madrid, Paris, Rome, and Venice in circles that included Meissonier, Sargent, Whistler, and the Goncourts. She is recorded as having sat for at least a half-dozen painters, including her father and her brother Raimundo.

Boldini in 1881

In 1881 Boldini was thirty-eight, established in Paris since 1871, and beginning the long ascent that would make him the most fashionable portraitist of European society. He maintained close ties to the Spanish colony in Paris — the Madrazo and Fortuny families chief among them — and many of his early commissions came through this network.

The 1881 Salon was a turning point. The Impressionist exhibitions had eroded the authority of the Academy without unseating it, and the high-society portrait was the surviving common ground between official and progressive painting. Boldini's loose, "sketched" finish — far less smooth than Sargent's, more incisive than Carolus-Duran's — gave him a niche that he would defend for forty years.

Technique and analysis

The picture's most striking technical feature is the contrast between the rapid, almost calligraphic treatment of the dress and accessories and the slower modeling of the head and hands. Boldini draws with the brush in the long folds of black silk, leaving the underdrawing visible in places — a method derived from his admiration for Velázquez and Hals and from his close study of Manet during the 1870s.

The flesh is painted wet-into-wet with a limited palette — lead white, vermilion, raw umber, viridian, and ivory black — producing the cool, slightly grey-pink complexion characteristic of Boldini's 1880s portraits. The shadow tones use the famous "couche grise" laid down before the second sitting, allowing the artist to keep flesh tones cool without descending into chalky highlights.

Provenance

The portrait remained in the Fortuny family for over a century, descending through Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo and into the collections kept at the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei in Venice (now the Museo Fortuny). High-resolution reproductions of the painting are available through the Wikimedia Commons collection of Boldini's works.

Further reading

• Tiziano Panconi & Sergio Gaddi, Boldini: lo spettacolo della modernità (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2013)
• Bianca Doria, Giovanni Boldini: catalogo generale dagli archivi Boldini (Milan: Rizzoli, 2000)
• Carlos Reyero, La pintura de historia en España (Madrid: Cátedra, 1989)