Two Framed Watercolor Portraits of Children, Ernesto Levorati. Currently in a private collection, images are from Bonham’s past auction from 2024. Bohanam’s gives the sheet size as 12 x 8″ (30 x 20 cm).

I just came across these two delightful watercolor portraits by 19th century Italian artist Ernesto Levorati by chance.

There is a wonderful delicacy to the softly textural applicaiton of watercolor. It appears to me to be in a dry brush technique, of the painstaking kind used for botanical illustration. It’s hard to be sure. It may just be granulating colors.

Whatever the technique, the end result is a soft, visually engaging paint surface that adds to the soft expressions of the subjects.

I don’t know much about Levorati, but I was suprised to see that the pair sold at auction for just a few hundred dollars.

The Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, Alice Maude Fanner; oil on canvas, 25 x 32 in. ( 64 x 81 cm). Image is from a Christie’s autcion in 2013; I assume the painting is currently in a private collection.

British painter Alice Fanner, who was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was noted for her landscapes, coastal scenes and cityscapes.

In this painting of the Luxembourg Gardens, she gives us an inviting view down the colonnade of trees along the green of the garden lawn, highlighted by a fountain in dappled shade and the sculptures that adorn it.

I love the turtles in the water, the way the fall colors of the trees splash into the fountain along with the blue of the sky and the lacework of tree shadows on the edge of the fountain. The view pulls us back into the distance so rapidly that we almost don’t notice the people out for a stroll under the trees at right.

The entire painting is wonderfully loose and painterly while retaining an academic rigor in its accurate perspective.