Pair of Applique Shear Plate Italy XIX Century - Mid 19th century

Oil on canvas. Eastern European School. Signed Szego G. below. These are two works to be proposed aligned because they depict a boy and a girl lying on the same lawn in a mirrored position, as if facing each other, probably intent on a love game: they wear gypsy clothes and have musical instruments with them - she a tambourine and him a violin - which refer to two characters of Slavic ethnicity, from the gypsy world. The whole is lively and serene. The two works are presented in styled frames.

Crayons on cardboard. Elegant portrait of a young lady, with a floral garland like a necklace. Presented in a contemporary golden frame.

Stable interior

Oil painting on canvas. Signed lower left. The work was previously acquired at the Sotheby's auction in Milan on 10/12/2007. It was exhibited in 1991 in the exhibition "Giovanni Sottocornola. Images from a collection" held in Milan at the Silbernagl Gallery. After an initial pictorial phase dedicated to portraits and still lifes, in the 1880s Giovanni Sottocornola approached social themes, which were becoming the favorite subjects of young Lombard painters attentive to the poorest aspects of society, linked to the adoption of original artistic techniques. Sottocornola embraced the practice of pointillist painting, of which he wrote in 1895 "For now it is certain, I am convinced that there is no other painting more capable of conveying certain sensations than this one". However, this type of painting remained entirely focused on light, on its uncertain tonal vibrations, as happens in the Interior of a stable, created towards the end of the 1980s, where the plays of light and shadow play and create the effects visual in the brushstrokes of color played on a few chromatic ranges, those of browns, expressed in a wide variety of shades. The work is presented in a period frame.

Oil on paper applied to canvas. The four works propose pastoral subjects, animated by shepherds with their herds and their faithful dogs, sometimes at rest on the side of the road, in two scenes also flanked by fruit sellers. The works are inspired (as well as by the citation on the back of one of them) by the production of Francesco Londonio, the Milanese artist of the 18th century who made a name for himself for his rural and pastoral scenes, in a repertoire of tasty snapshots of peasant life. The four paintings are presented in contemporary gilded frames, with small defects.

Maria Dolente

Marble bas-relief. Engraved signature along the left margin. Born in Cannobbio (on Lake Maggiore), Giulio Branca was introduced to the art by the Cannobio sculptor Bergonzoli, and later attended G. Strazza's school of nude drawing and sculpture at the Brera Academy. Born in Cannobio on 13 December 1850 to Ludovico, he was introduced to art by the Cannobio sculptor Bergonzoli, and attended the school of the nude and G. Strazza's school of sculpture at the Brera Academy. He made about four hundred sculptures, including memorials, funerary monuments and portrait busts. Branca also took part, following a competition, in the completion of the high wall of the cathedral of Como, which had remained unfinished for centuries, sculpting several figures in white marble for the façade and the altar between 1897 and 1900. The work presented here is a bas-relief showing a half-bust of the grieving Madonna flanked by two pious women. It is presented in a coeval wooden frame from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

Oil painting on canvas. Northern European school of the 19th century. Family portrait of three girls, whose marked resemblance in facial features, smile and witty and mischievous gaze, is underlined by the almost identical clothes they wear, whose bright colors enliven the scene and on which the laces of the necklines stand out, exquisitely painted; the youngest in the center, still a child, has a slightly less worked dress and a less elaborate hairstyle, in keeping with her age. The painting is presented in a late 19th century frame that has been adapted and regilded.