When an auctioneer entered a dust-covered old Parisian apartment in June to take inventory of the deceased owner’s possessions, he had the impression of creeping into Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
In the gloom of the apartment that had been shut-up for decades, he came across a portrait unknown to art experts of a beautiful woman by one of 19th-century Paris’ most prized portrait artists, Italian Giovanni Boldini.
“There was a smell of old dust,” auctioneer Olivier Choppin-Janvry said.
PHOTO: AFP / MARC OTTAVI
The painting recently fetched 2.1 million euros (US$2.9 million) in frenzied bidding, making a record for one of the artist’s works.
The apartment’s last occupant, who was the granddaughter of Boldini’s muse, had shut it up before World War II to go live in the south of France and never returned.
The woman recently died at the age of 91 years, having paid upkeep fees for the large apartment in central Paris for 70 years without using it.
The painting, which had hung in the apartment’s living room, was the portrait of an actress of exceptional beauty who went by the name of Marthe de Florian enshrouded in a pale pink mousseline evening dress.
She had hosted her many admirers in the apartment where “she kept letters from her lovers in little packages wrapped up with ribbons of different colors,” according one of the people who worked on the inventory.
Calling cards of senior statesmen from the period were found tucked away in drawers.
When the auctioneer discovered the painting, he had a doubt about its authenticity and asked expert Marc Ottavi to examine it.
“No reference books on Boldini mentioned the painting, which had never been exhibited in public,” Ottavi said.
However, one of Boldini’s calling cards was found with a message indicating that the painter was one of de Florian’s lovers.
“We had the link and I was then certain that it was a very fine Boldini,” Ottavi said.
Nevertheless, Ottavi’s team kept investigating and eventually found a mention of the portrait, painted in 1898 when de Florian was 24, in a 1951 book by the painter’s widow.
When the portrait went to -auction, bidding started at 300,000 euros.
“We had 10 buyers on the telephone and interested buyers in the room,” Ottavi said.
Eager would-be buyers quickly bid up the painting’s price to 1.3 million euros before it finally went to a determined collector in the auction room for 1.7 million euros, or 2.1 million euros including fees.
“It was a magical moment, you could see that the buyer really liked the painting and paid the price of passion,” Ottavi said.
Born in the northern Italian city of Ferrara in 1842, Boldini moved to Paris in 1871 and quickly became one of the era’s most sought-after portrait artists, painting the Duchess of Marlborough, Giuseppe Verdi and Edgar Degas before he died in 1931.
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