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signed Boldini and dated 1898 (lower right)

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Baron Maurice de Rothschild (acquired directly from the artist)
Thence by descent
Sale, Christie's, New York, November 1, 1995, lot 14, illustrated (acquired by the present owner from the above sale)
EXHIBITED

New York, Wildenstein and Co., Loan Exhibition, Paintings by Boldini, 1845- 1931, 1920, no. 18
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

C. Ragghianti and E. Camesasca, L'Opera completa di Boldini, Milan, 1970, p. 113, no. 297 illustrated (as Signora con bambino vestito da marinaio)
P. Mauries, Boldini, Milan, 1987, p. 69, illustrated
B. Doria, Giovanni Boldini, Catalogo generale dagli archivi Boldini, Milan, 2000, no. 393 (as Signora con bambino vestito da marinaio)
T. Panconi, Giovanni Boldini, L'Opera Completa, Florence, 2002, p. 385 illustrated
CATALOGUE NOTE

Giovanni Boldini's fame will always rest on the portraits of fashionable women that form the most substantial portion of his oeuvre; but the small number of portraits that he painted of children alone or posing with their mothers are certainly among his most individually satisfying creations. Portrait of Madame Hugo and her Son, painted in 1898, is strikingly appealing in its own right; but it also fully rewards closer study with unusual insights into the social order of fin-de-siècle France, the impact of rapidly changing conventions of portraiture and the appeal of an elusive "modernity".

Boldini's choice of pose with a mother looking off, away from her son, and in fact visibly restrained from moving by the child's embrace, is a challenge to prevailing notions of good-motherhood, at least as those were celebrated in family portraiture. Often compared to the static, forward-facing mother and son in John Singer Sargent's Mrs. Edward Davis and her son Livingston (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) because both young boys wear the fashionable sailor suits of the 1890s, Boldini's portrait is a testament to fashionably fast lives and the competing demands on his sitters as the nineteenth-century turned to twentieth. The tensions Edgar Degas (a Boldini friend) might have teased out in such an interaction are skillfully undercut by the young boy's playful smile and his mother's restraining hand. The viewer senses a larger world, beyond the picture frame, has momentarily intruded.

Confusion over the identification of the sitters for this portrait was resolved in 1995, at the time of the picture's sale from the Rothschild collection. Not Mme. Jean Hugo and son, as previously published (real personages, although not of the appropriate age for this dated portrait), but actually Jeanne Hugo, grand-daughter of Victor Hugo, the revered French author, and her son, Charles Daudet. The title, Madame Hugo and her Son, is an invented appellation combining Jeanne Hugo's maiden name and the courtesy title of Madame, as she was thrice a widow, with a surname different from her son's, when the painting was first publicly exhibited in 1933.

The Catalogo generale completamente of the Museo Giovanni Boldini (Ferrara, 1997, p. 431) publishes a mis-identified drawing that must have been Boldini's primary compositional study for the charming pose of the sitters in Portrait of Madame Hugo and her Son. The rapid outline sketch is in itself a testament to how well Boldini understood the human figure and to his ability to quickly seize movement from live models.

This catalogue entry was written by Alexandra Murphy.