Boldini: Lady Nanne Schrader face swap

Where this one comes from

Giovanni Boldini was an Italian who settled in Paris and became the portraitist the international rich competed to be painted by around the turn of the century. This is Lady Nanne Schrader, painted in 1903. His method was speed: enormously long loaded brushstrokes that describe satin, fur and movement without describing any of it precisely, and a face finished carefully in the middle of the storm.

What is in the picture

Cascading white and grey fabric rendered in strokes that are clearly strokes, an armchair, a swirl of background, and in the middle of it a head painted with much more care than anything around it. That contrast is the whole method — the eye reads the finished face as precise and accepts the blur elsewhere as motion. Boldini drew out the neck and the limbs, made everybody slightly taller and more angular than they were, and his sitters liked it.

When people use it

For an entrance. It is the picture for arriving somewhere overdressed and unapologetic, and it does glamour more straightforwardly than anything else in this catalogue.

How your face lands in it

A sharply finished face in the centre of a deliberately unfinished picture, turned three-quarters and lit softly from the front. Because the original face is the one crisp thing in the frame, a good high-resolution photograph works better here than in the darker templates, and the contrast with the surrounding brushwork does the rest.

Portrait of Lady Nanne Schrader — Giovanni Boldini, 1903. Giovanni Boldini died in 1931, which places the painting in the public domain in its country of origin and in the United States, where works published before 1930 are free. Source

Also in: Paintings · Oil portraits