The tale of a forgotten Boldini painting sold for €2.1 million

"It was a magical moment, you could see that the buyer really liked the painting and paid the price of passion," art expert Marc Ottavi told the French news agency AFP after a painting by the Italian artist Giovanni Boldini recently went under the hammer for €2.1 million.

Image: Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931) from Wikipedia

And it's probably not difficult to understand his delight as the painting was only discovered in June this year, having spent 70 years in a forgotten Parisian apartment.

The painting was of Marthe de Florian, a former muse of the artist, and had belonged to her granddaughter who died earlier this year at the age of 91.

She had maintained the charges on the apartment but had not actually lived there for decades.

It was when the deceased woman's family asked auctioneer Olivier Choppin-Janvry to make an inventory of everything she had left behind that the masterpiece was found.

Because among the treasures and under the dust was what he discovered to be "the portrait of an actress of exceptional beauty who went by the name of Marthe de Florian enshrouded in a pale pink mousseline evening dress."

The only problem was apparently that to begin with Choppin-Janvry wasn't 100 percent certain of its provenance: there was no proof that it had been painted by Boldini and had never been listed among any works by the painter.

After Ottavi was called in, the real investigation began. It soon yielded results.

One of the artist's visiting cards was found with a scribbled message clearly indicating that Boldini had been one of de Florian's lovers.

And then lo and behold, a mention of the portrait was discovered in a book from 1951 by the painter's widow; a mention which was proof positive that the portrait had been painted in 1898 when de Florian was 24 years old.

Armed with that information, the painting went to auction where, from a starting price of €300,000, it was finally sold for a world record for the artist of €2.1 million.