RETROSPECCIÓN :: Christa Zaat

Christa Zaat



Giovanni Boldini (Italian painter) 1842 - 1931
Portrait of Madame Gabrielle Réjane, ca. 1886-87
oil on canvas
68.5 x 54.2 cm. (27 x 21.38 in.)
signed Boldini (lower right) and inscribed Zographos (upper left)
private collection

Catalogue Note
Giovanni Boldini painted his Portrait of Madame Gabrielle Réjane at the end of the 1880s, probably in 1886-87, as the young actress was coming into her own as a celebrated star and as the artist himself was establishing his position as portraitiste extraordinaire to the artistic and literary elites of Belle Epoque Paris. One of numerous paintings of the acclaimed actress which Boldini executed during perhaps a decade of friendship, Portrait of Madame Gabrielle Réjane is the closest to a formal portrait and the one of Boldini's images which Réjane kept for herself, claiming to prefer it to the many other portraits for which she sat over her lifetime.

There is little in Portrait of Madame Gabrielle Réjane to suggest the stage or Grand Boulevard glamour; only the small sketch of a gentleman pouring over a newspaper and the cryptic inscription "Zographos" (perhaps a reference to a contemporary theater critic) hint at a background narrative in the painting. Instead, seated in Boldini's studio or perhaps receiving the artist in her own loge (stage suite), Réjane is dressed in quiet, working elegance, a simple blue-gray wrapper protecting her beautifully embroidered or brocade dress. As she chats attentively with someone outside the picture space, Boldini's subject with upswept red-gold curls, her pointed chin and perky nose make her identity unmistakable. In 1886-87, Réjane was still a year or two away from the first of the starring roles that would settle her fame irrevocably, but in dozens of supporting parts over a decade she had already been recognized as the embodiment of la Parisienne, that pretty, witty, modishly dressed, self-defined and luminously confident young lady deemed unique to the capital of France. Boldini, who had had an important hand in creating the visual realization of la Parisienne since the 1870s certainly recognized the genuine example in Réjane. Whether it was he or she who determined how Réjane dressed and posed for this portrait, the charming likeness and the casual spontaneity that resulted attest to the comfortable friendship they shared. Both artists were well aware of the importance of shaping one's own style and image.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Gabrielle Charlotte Reju was the acknowledged queen of French comedy and light drama, reigning along with Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse over the international theater world. During the 1880s and 1890s, she performed on every major stage in Paris and toured successfully in England and America several times. Her tour schedule eventually included engagements in Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cuba and South America and on one trip two emperors, two kings and three queens enjoyed Réjane's performances. In 1906, she opened her own theater at 15 rue Blance (now the Théâtre de Paris) where she continued to star for several years in what was considered one of the most beautiful venues in a stage-mad city. During her lifetime, Réjane was drawn or painted by nearly every significant portraitist or illustrator in Paris or London, from Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet and John Singer Sargent to Aubrey Beardsley; the fashionable photographer Nadar provided many of her publicity images (fig. 1). And around the same time that Réjane was posing for Boldini, she also powerfully smote the soul of a then-unknown young writer. Marcel Proust, who went on to become an admiring friend of Réjane, built large parts of the character of the actress La Berma in A la recherche du temps perdu on Réjane; and for a time at the end of the first world war he actually lived in her apartment building.

Gabrielle Reju was a child of Paris, born in 1856 to a father who was a sometime-actor turned theater manager and a mother who ran a theater buffet. Her parents resisted her early-expressed desire to be an actress, but a single-minded determination won her a place at fifteen in the Conservatoire (the government-sponsored school that trained actors and actresses for French national theaters) and her devotion to mastering every theater skill from diction through dancing to costume construction gained her the affectionate support and tutelage of Regnier, a past master of the Comédie Française. She began her career at the Théâtre Vaudeville, an important Paris stage for comedies of social manners, modern tragedy and light opera, and she established her name slowly in dozens of supporting roles as a ladies' maid, a country cousin, or a good-natured confidante -- small parts often lumped together as soubrettes in which a clever young actress might study the older actors around her at the same time she herself was granted relative latitude to develop her own lesser characters.
It is as a classic soubrette that fashionable portraitist Théobald Chartran painted Réjane in 1884 in Portrait of Réjane as a Young Actress (see lot 97). Although neither the specific play nor the character Réjane was creating with the be-ribboned lace cap and flowing dressing gown of an eighteenth-century boudoir have been recorded, the portrait itself must have represented an important moment for her. Family photographs record the Portrait of Réjane as a Young Actress hanging at the center of the satin canopy above Réjane's own bed, perhaps as a reminder of a first or favorite early success. Or, perhaps the charming innocence that Chartran captured provided the actress with a continuing measure of the distance she covered as she moved from often-generic roles to the extraordinarily realized personalities she began to create just a few years later.

In 1888, Réjane starred at the Odéon in Germinie Lacerteux, the Goncourt brothers' searing tragedy whose title character was a working woman destroyed by drink and debauchery. Réjane's performance was lauded throughout Paris and she was credited with giving the difficult play a brand new power. As Germinie, Réjane began to redefine herself as a symbol of the deep strength and character of the common woman, beginning her self-determined move from la Parisienne to emblem of le peuple. As Réjane's status and power increased, she made strategic choices to undertake more tragic dramas, such as Alphonse Daudet's Sapho (one of the plays that so moved Proust), but she never abandoned the lighter comedies that had first ensured her popular triumphs. Her fame was truly made in 1895 in her performance as Madame Sans-Gêne (Madame Cool or Madame Cheeky) in a play written expressly for her by Victorien Sardou. Réjane created a plucky, sometimes hard-as-nails, washerwoman who rose spectacularly in the world as the wife of one of Napoleon's officers -- ultimately daring to put the Emperor in his place for an unpaid laundry bill!
In 1898, Réjane posed for Albert Besnard, one of the most successful decorative painters and portraitists of official Paris during the Belle Epoque (see lot 98). Besnard, in a life-size painting now unfortunately lost, presented Réjane gliding across a stage in a billowing pink satin gown draped very low beneath her shoulders, as she pauses to acknowledge the applause of an unseen audience who've thrown roses into her path. The painting was shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 and widely acclaimed; it attained a very significant afterlife in numerous color reproductions and for decades the Portrait de Théâtre adorned candy box lids, almost certainly without Réjane's approval. The actress refused the portrait, presumably, as the press speculated, because she disliked the artifice of the pose or perhaps because she rejected the presumption of the artist's subtitle. Instead, she accepted from Besnard one of the pastel studies the artist had made in preparation. Portrait of Réjane (Study for "Portrait de Théâtre") is one of the last drawn images of the actress -- she would continue to pose frequently for photographers -- and in the artist's quick effort to record her features, Besnard realized a wonderfully telling impression of the confidence and spirit that so defined Réjane.