Unknown

Old Master Italian 17th Century portrait of a Young Girl.

Circa 1680

Thomas Spencer was a leading sporting and equestrian artist of the period of John Wootton and James Seymour; his art shows a considerable to debt to tha...

English 19th century portrait of a White / Grey hunter in a stable. Charles Towne was born in Wigan in 1763. He was trained as a coach painter, and by ...

Portrait of a young British Girl, in her white dress with Pink Sash. Choosing to acquire an 18th-century portrait of a young girl by English artist John Russell is an opportunity to...

Outstanding early 18th century English portrait of James Bellevue. The portrait was always believed to be the work of Sir Godfrey Kneller who was known to have painted James Bellevu...

Wonderful 18th century Irish or English portrait, attributed to the Irish painter Nathaniel Hone. Nathaniel Hone was born in Dublin but by 1748 had set...

A wonderful Oval oil on canvas portrait of a little girl. Very much in the style of Jean-Baptiste Greuze.

Provenance: Torres Family Collection, Asunción, Paraguay, ca. 1967-2017 While the genre of portraiture flourished in the New World, very few examples of early Spanish colonial portraits have survived to the present day. This remarkable painting is a rare example of female portraiture, depicting a member of the highest echelons of society in Cuzco during the last quarter of the 17th century. Its most distinctive feature is the false beauty mark (called a chiqueador) that the sitter wears on her left temple. Chiqueadores served both a cosmetic and medicinal function. In addition to beautifying their wearers, these silk or velvet pouches often contained medicinal herbs thought to cure headaches. This painting depicts an unidentified lady from the Creole elite in Cuzco. Her formal posture and black costume are both typical of the established conventions of period portraiture and in line with the severe fashion of the Spanish court under the reign of Charles II, which remained current until the 18th century. She is shown in three-quarter profile, her long braids tied with soft pink bows and decorated with quatrefoil flowers, likely made of silver. Her facial features are idealized and rendered with great subtly, particularly in the rosy cheeks. While this portrait lacks the conventional coat of arms or cartouche that identifies the sitter, her high status is made clear by the wealth of jewels and luxury materials present in the painting. She is placed in an interior, set off against the red velvet curtain tied in the middle with a knot on her right, and the table covered with gold-trimmed red velvet cloth at the left. The sitter wears a four-tier pearl necklace with a knot in the center with matching three-tiered pearl bracelets and a cross-shaped earing with three increasingly large pearls. She also has several gold and silver rings on both hands—one holds a pair of silver gloves with red lining and the other is posed on a golden metal box, possibly a jewelry box. The materials of her costume are also of the highest quality, particularly the white lace trim of her wide neckline and circular cuffs. The historical moment in which this painting was produced was particularly rich in commissions of this kind. Following his arrival in Cuzco from Spain in the early 1670’s, bishop Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo actively promoted the emergence of a distinctive regional school of painting in the city. Additionally, with the increase of wealth and economic prosperity in the New World, portraits quickly became a way for the growing elite class to celebrate their place in society and to preserve their memory. Portraits like this one would have been prominently displayed in a family’s home, perhaps in a dynastic portrait gallery. We are grateful to Professor Luis Eduardo Wuffarden for his assistance cataloguing this painting on the basis of high-resolution images. He has written that “the sober palette of the canvas, the quality of the pigments, the degree of aging, and the craquelure pattern on the painting layer confirm it to be an authentic and representative work of the Cuzco school of painting...

This stunning Old Master 17th century oil portrait painting is attributed to Francesco Fieravino, an artist famous in his day for still lifes and carpets. This painting which dates t...

Collections: Robert Gallon (1845-1925); Private Collection, UK. Oil on canvas laid down on panel Framed dimensions: 11.5 x 10 inches This highly engaging, previously unpublished portrait by Johan...

Procaccini was born in Bologna, but his family moved to Milan when the artist was eleven years old. His artistic education was evidently familial— from his father Ercole and his elder brothers Camillo and Carlo Antonio, all painters—but his career began as a sculptor, and at an early age: his first known commission, a sculpted saint for the Duomo of Milan, came when he was only seventeen years old. Procaccini’s earliest documented painting, the Pietà for the Church of Santa Maria presso San Celso in Milan, was completed by 1604. By this time the artist had made the trip to Parma recorded by his biographers, where he studied Correggio, Mazzola Bedoli, and especially Parmigianino; reflections of their work are apparent throughout Procaccini's career. As Dr. Hugh Brigstocke has recently indicated, the present oil sketch is preparatory for the figure of the angel seen between the heads of the Virgin and St. Charles Borrommeo in Procaccini's altarpiece in the Church of Santa Afra in Brescia (ill. in Il Seicento Lombardo; Catalogo dei dipinti e delle sculture, exh. cat. Milan 1973, no. 98, pl. 113). As such it is the only known oil sketch of Procaccini's that can be directly connected with an extant altarpiece. The finished canvas, The Virgin and Child with Saints Charles Borrommeo and Latino with Angels, remains in the church for which it was painted; it is one of the most significant works of Procaccini's maturity and is generally dated after the artist's trip to Genoa in 1618. The Head of an Angel is an immediate study, no doubt taken from life, but one stylistically suffused with strong echoes of Correggio and Leonardo. Luigi Lanzi, writing of the completed altarpiece in 1796, specifically commented on Procaccini's indebtedness to Correggio (as well as the expressions of the angels) here: “Di Giulio Cesare...

Signed and dated, lower left: Louise Hersent/ 1823 Provenance: Private Collection, Chicago, by 1996 Private Collection, Florida This charming portrait of a young boy is the work of Louise-Marie-Jeanne Hersent, a little-known woman artist of the French Restoration often identified by her maiden name, Mauduit. While Hersent—as we will call her here following the signature on the painting—has been understudied, the known details of her life and career reveal that she held a privileged position in artistic life in the early nineteenth century in Paris. She exhibited at the Salon from 1810 until 1824, and in 1821 she married the painter Louis Hersent, a successful pupil of Jacques-Louis David who was patronized by Louis XVIII and Charles X. It is likely through her husband’s royal patronage that Hersent’s Louis XIV Visits Peter the Great was purchased for the Royal Collection in Versailles. In 1806, while still Louise Mauduit, she painted a portrait of Napoleon’s youngest sister, Pauline Bonaparte...

Signed, inscribed and dated, lower right: 'Geo Dawe RA St Petersburgh 1819', also signed with initials, lower centre: 'G D RA'; and signed and inscribed verso: 'Geo Dawe RA Pinxit 1819 St Petersburgh'; Also inscribed on the stretcher by Cornelius Varley with varnishing instructions. Collections: Private collection, UK, 2010 Literature: Galina Andreeva Geniuses of War, Weal and Beauty: George Dawe...