Giovanni Boldini

By the 1890s the fashionable women of Paris wanted to be painted by an Italian with a brush that never seemed to stop moving. Giovanni Boldini gave society portraiture a new speed, long slashing strokes that make a satin gown look caught mid-swish, sitters twisting and elongated as if the paint could barely hold them still.

He had begun far more soberly in Florence among the Macchiaioli, Italian painters working in small blots of light and shade, before Paris and its Belle Epoque money remade him into its portraitist of choice. His subjects were the celebrities of the day, aristocrats, actresses and dandies like the poet Robert de Montesquiou.

One of his finest is small and quiet by comparison, a pastel of the aged composer Giuseppe Verdi in a soft top hat and white scarf, done in a single sitting in 1886. Verdi liked it best of all his portraits, and it became the image of the composer that Italy still reproduces.