Giovanni Boldini

Giovanni Boldini painted the high society of Belle Epoque Paris in a whirl of movement. His women lean, twist and glance out of the canvas in silk and satin, and the brushstrokes around them sweep so fast across the picture that he was called the master of swish. Faces and hands are sharp; everything else dissolves into energetic streaks.

Born in Ferrara in 1842, the son of a painter, he studied in Florence in the 1860s alongside the Macchiaioli, the Italian painters who worked in patches of light and colour. After a spell in London he moved to Paris in the early 1870s and became the city’s most fashionable portrait painter, a friend of Degas, with sitters such as the Marchesa Luisa Casati. He died in Paris in 1931, aged 88.

In Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, with Her Son Ivor, now in the Metropolitan Museum, compare the careful faces with the flying brushwork of the dress.