Works on paper, Giovanni Boldini

Bottegantica Gallery, Milan

Boldini's activity as an engraver was not at all marginal or episodic, not even if compared to the denser and more continuous activity as a draftsman and painter. There is no period or phase of his life in which he did not exercise the minute and patient practice of working on copper or zinc, with the almost exclusive choice of the indirect systems of etching and drypoint.

Boldini engraved fifty-three works between 1876 and 1912, a period in which the art of engraving regained its primacy over other techniques of reproduction, imposing itself as a free and autonomous means of expression. In France, this rebirth was supported by illustrious critics and writers such as Charles Baudelaire, the brothers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Victor Hugo, Philippe Burty, Armand Gautier, Émile Zola and above all by the publisher Alfred Cadart and the printer Auguste Delâtre, founders of the Société des Aquafortistes.

Thanks to their contribution, engraving acquires in a short time a position of prominence in Parisian artistic circles, used regularly by many avant-garde painters always ready to engage in new and original languages of expression.

In such a dynamic and articulated context, the activity of Boldini as an engraver is rather singular.

In spite of his frequent contacts with the publishing industry, the Association of Etchers and the various typographic laboratories present in Paris, he decided not to practice engraving for commercial purposes and never to exhibit any of his prints in public.

It is assumed that Boldini considered this activity marginal, on which he laid down a confidentiality even greater than that with which Degas kept his sculpting to himself. The engraved work - almost always carried out in the privacy of his atelier - assumed for him the precise meaning of a laboratory of invention as well as stylistic verification to be conducted in parallel with painting.