19th century Italian School

Set of Five late 19th century Italian or French portraits of Putti or Angels

circa 1890

Outstanding small oil on velum sketch of a North African/ Arab head study. The painting is a classic sketch and I'm sure the figure would have been used in a much larger finished w...

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...

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...

late 19th-century Irish school portrait of a seated man smoking a pipe in a barn interior. A very well-painted and skillfully composed portrait of a wor...

Well painted 19th-century portrait of a young boy possible in a School Uniform. With the label on the reverse being from Scottish panel makers, we bel...

Pieter Symonsz Potter Dutch 1600 - 1652 Soldier in an Interior Oil on oak panel, red seal to reverse Image size: 15 x 10 3/4 inches Dutch Ebonised frame Bathed in a well lit roo...

17th century old master Portrait painting of Anna Maria De Camiudo Anna Maria de Camiudo was a Spanish noblewoman and daughter of Don Pedro Velasques de Camiudo and Dona Maria de l...

Oil Painting After Sir Peter Lely (1610-1680) Portrait of a Lady Housed in a Lely gold Leaf Frame. Peter Lely: In 1647 he became a member of the Pain...

This replica of the last self-portrait of Jean-Baptiste Greuze painted in 1804, executed by his daughter Anna at her father's side and recently rediscovered, provides us with a poignant image of the great artist, represented with panache despite the disillusions of life. 1. Jean-Baptiste Greuze Jean-Baptiste Greuze was the sixth child of a roofer from Tournus and retained a certain rusticity in his behaviour from his provincial childhood, beyond his taste for describing picturesque scenes of the countryside. He initially started training with a little-known painter from Lyon, Charles Grandon, before his genius was recognised in Paris where he became a full-time student of the Académie (of Painting) in 1755. He exhibited his work for the first time at the Salon during the summer of 1755, before leaving on a trip to Italy in the company of Louis Gougenot, abbot of Chezal-Benoît. Upon his return to Paris, Greuze became a prolific painter, participating widely in the Salons held between 1759 and 1765, to which he sent no less than 63 paintings: numerous genre scenes (The Marriage Contract, The Beloved Mother), but also portraits of his family circle, of courtiers and art lovers, or of his colleagues. The Academy closed the doors of the Salons to him in 1767 for not having produced his reception piece within six months of his reception, as was the tradition. He worked actively on this painting (Emperor Severus rebukes Caracalla, his son, for trying to assassinate him ) until the summer of 1769, tackling historical and mythological subjects for the first time. Once this was completed, he was then fully admitted to the Academy, but as a genre painter, and not as an historical painter, which had been one of the greatest humiliations of his life. Greuze then refused any participation in events organised by the Academy or its successor, the Academy of Fine Arts until 1800. Abandoning history painting, he gave a new twist to genre scenes, bringing them closer to history painting, as in this pair of canvases which constitutes some of his masterpieces: The Paternal Curse: The Ungrateful Son and The Paternal Curse: The Punished Son . Married in 1759 to Anne-Gabrielle Babuti, the daughter of a Parisian bookseller, his marriage was unhappy and his wife probably frequently unfaithful. The institution of divorce enabled him to record their separation in 1793, keeping his two daughters Anna-Geneviève, born in April 1762, and Louise-Gabrielle, born in May 1764, with him. Little is known about his daughter Anna except that she was herself a painter and lived with her father until his death. It is likely that most of the paintings she produced up to that date were attributed to her father, whose technique she shared to a great extent, making it extremely difficult to establish an autonomous corpus of her paintings. Greuze died in his studio at the Louvre on March 21st 1805. The attention paid to the expressivity of his characters and the emotional charge they convey enabled Jean-Baptiste Greuze to enjoy immense popularity with the eighteenth-century public, and they still constitute Greuze's true modernity. As the artist said, "I dipped my brush in my heart". Greuze was also an exceptional draughtsman and a portraitist of immense talent and exceptional longevity who painted both the Dauphin (the son of Louis XV and father to Louis XVI) and the young Napoleon Bonaparte. 2. Greuze's self-portraits Greuze was very much influenced by Dutch paintings during all his life. While the source of his inspiration for genre scenes can be found in Gerard Dou...

Pietro Bardellino (Naples, 1731 – Naples, 1806) Mary Magdalene Oil on canvas, cm. 75 x 60 – with frame cm. 97 x 82 Antique shaped and carved wooden frame Publications: unpublished T...

Antonio Mercurio Amorosi (Comunanza 1660 - 1738) Portrait of a little girl with cat Oil on canvas, cm. 42 x 31.5 – with frame cm. 56 x 44 Shaped, carved and gilded wooden cassetta fr...