Dear Friends, The exciting news was in my Yahoo email this afternoon. A Paris home untouched for 70 years was finally entered, revealing a million-dollar art treasure! Here is the note.
In Paris, an apartment sat locked up and untouched for 70 years. But it wasn't abandoned or empty. The rent was being paid, and the swanky pad was filled with furniture, books, and various works of art. One of those paintings, it turns out, was worth a lot of money.
A very buzzy story from the U.K.'s Telegraph explains that the valuable work of art is by Italian artist Giovanni Boldini. It recently sold for €2.1 million (around US$2.9 million) at auction. The painting's subject, "a woman in a pink muslin evening dress," was apparently Boldini's muse, Marthe de Florian. That hunch was legitimized by another titillating discovery in the apartment: a scribbled love note from the artist to de Florian. The apartment belonged to de Florian's granddaughter, who recently passed away at age 91.
One might well ask, "Why leave an apartment untouched and unused, but still pay for it every month?" Good question. According to the Telegraph, the granddaughter left the apartment just before the start of World War II and never returned. After her recent death, experts were sent to catalogue the inventory.
As the Telegraph writes, "Entering the untouched, cobweb-filled flat in Paris' 9th arrondissement, one expert said it was like stumbling into the castle of Sleeping Beauty, where time had stood still since 1900." Imagine their surprise when they saw, lying among the items, a painting worth millions.
News of the discovery sent Web searches on "giovanni boldini" skyrocketing 2,800% in just over 24 hours. Suddenly, it seems, people are eager to know more about the artist. Perhaps they want to compare his work to a few paintings gathering dust in their basements. Could one be worth big money? Hope springs eternal, but before you get too excited, remember that Boldini never dabbled in the subject of dogs playing poker. Sorry.
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More about the painter and his work in my next post.
Thank you,
Luis Miguel Goitizolo
"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
Giovanni Boldini (December 31, 1842 - July 11, 1931) was an Italian genre and portrait painter, belonging to the Parisian school. According to a 1933 article in Time magazine, he was known as the "Master of Swish" because of his flowing style of painting.
Boldini was born in Ferrara, the son of a painter of religious subjects, and went to Florence in 1862 to study painting, meeting there the realist painters known as the Macchiaioli. Their influence is seen in Boldini's landscapes which show his spontaneous response to nature, although it is for his portraits that he became best known. He attained great success in London as a portraitist. From 1872 Boldini lived in Paris, where he became a friend of Edgar Degas. He also became the most fashionable portrait painter in Paris in the late 19th century, with a dashing style of painting which shows some Impressionist influence but which most closely resembles the work of his contemporaries John Singer Sargent and Paul Helleu. He was nominated commissioner of the Italian section of the Paris Exposition in 1889, and received the Legion d'honneur for this appointment. He died in Paris in 1931. (From Wikipedia)
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Note: The above information was taken from 'Giovanni Boldini - The Complete Works' at http://www.giovanniboldini.org/
And here is my choice of a incredibly beautiful portrait by this painter:
Thank you Miguel, this is very interesting. I love this painting.
Sara
Quote:Thank you Miguel, this is very interesting. I love this painting. Sara
Tomorrow I hope to also post some land and seascapes by this painter who has been compared to Sargent and Bouguereau among other great artists of his time.