Antique Painting Adolfo Magrini Mixed Technique on Cardboard 1896 - Ballerina 1896

Love and Wine

Oil on metal plate, with a trapezoidal shape and a concave center, in which the pictorial scene is inscribed, while the four corners are embossed with decorations. The painting presents a cheerful and gallant scene between a young and attractive innkeeper, who is pouring wine from the barrel into the flasks, and a customer who approaches her to have his glass filled. The painting has slight color losses. It is presented in a glass case frame, in style.

Soap Bubbles

Oil on metal plate, with a trapezoidal shape and a concave center, in which the pictorial scene is inscribed, while the four corners are embossed with decorations. The painting offers a joyful scene: a group of children play with soap bubbles that one of them is blowing, while the others watch them amused and the older girl lifts the little one up so he can catch them! There are slight color losses. It is presented in a style display frame.

Gallant Scene 1885

Lithography. Signed lower left. Published by Arthur Tooth in London. The scene is typical of the painter of Italian-Austrian origins: Eugene de Blaas favored cute and often mischievous genre scenes, with girls and young men (often placed in Venetian streets but not only) intent on chatting, gossiping and courtship games. His favorite subject was the common female figure, depicted with an angelic face with diaphanous skin and a mischievous and romantic look, described with bright colors and with excellent technique in her daily environment. The lithograph has widespread humidity stains. In a mid-20th century frame.

Wooden sculptures. It is a composition of two wooden heads, a male one and a female one, placed on a board and framed by a gilded frame of 19th century. The heads might had been the handles of a canteran of 17th century.

Oil painting on canvas. The portrait of the young man, elegantly dressed, is inscribed in an oval outline. There are slight drops of color and signs of sagging of the canvas. It therefore needs restoration. It is presented in a coeval frame, with various signs of wear, to be restored.

Fabric embroidery. The embroidery represents a half-length girl in a popular costume with a mask, in the comedy of art style. It is mounted on a wooden frame with two side handles, commanding a rear coupling, probably being a closing panel.

Oil on canvas, applied to panel. A very human newborn Jesus lies abandoned in his sleep, while little John venerates him by kissing his chubby little hand; resting on the white sheets of the cradle, the pastoral staff in the shape of a cross, with the band bearing the writing "Ecce Homo": the only iconographic symbol of spiritual content, it is however also proposed in smaller dimensions, appropriate to the age of the two children. The work presents some small losses of paint. Strip frame.

Composed of woodblocked sheets, sewn together and partly colored, with matching figures and texts. The group consists of 23 booklets, of which two in three copies and one in four copies; another couple has the same cover but different contents. The booklets can be considered as "manga" of the nineteenth century: the word "manga" still today can designate many different productions, such as single cartoons, scattered drawings, more elaborate illustrations, comic strips, comic books, as well as animated drawings. Therefore, starting from the assumption that there is no "manga form" but different ways of conceiving objects and graphic forms all denominated with this word, the term manga can be attested in literary and essayistic use in Japan as early as the eighteenth century to indicate, as mentioned above, drawings and sketches. But it is from the first half of the nineteenth century that Katsushika Hokusai's 15 volumes of illustrations, studies, graphic entertainment and detailed bichromatic prints became established, thanks to the progressive publication, starting from 1814. If, on the other hand, we want to give the word the more specific meaning of “stories drawn in sequence”, then the debut must be placed in the second half of the nineteenth century, similarly to what happened in Europe and the United States for comics. The booklets are in good condition.

Oil on canvas, applied to panel. French School. Signed F. Barthélemy and dated 1876 lower left. The scene is in oriental taste and setting, and suggests the domestic and intellectual education of a young girl (the reference, albeit secular, to the Education of the Virgin is evident!): a young girl, standing at the center of the scene, while intent on embroidery, listens to the teaching of her mother, who is holding some written sheets in her hands; the elderly woman is dressed in oriental dress and reclining on a triclinium, while, behind her, a servant moves the curtain, revealing the background of an imposing classical temple. The scene is characterized by carefully crafted and richly detailed settings, such as the bunch of flowers on the embroidery table, the fabric covering the triclinium on which the mother is reclining; the intimate and domestic atmosphere is underlined by the earthy colours of the palace walls, on which the bright colours of the figures stand out, well lit by the light bursting from outside. The painting is presented in a period frame.

The Ancient Baptistery of Gravedona

Pencil and watercolor on paper. Signed lower left. Of the same subject but with characters, there is a version on canvas by the Milanese artist, preserved in the civic Raccolta d'arte Museo dell'Ottocento of Villa Belgioioso Bonaparte, in Milan. Luigi Bisi specialized in interior views of churches in Lombardy, with a predilection for the Milan Cathedral. The work is presented in a frame.

Courtship at the Well 1873

Oil on canvas. Signed and dated lower right. Haier was a Viennese painter and photographer, but lived for a long time in the Czech Republic. His pictorial production includes portraits and many genre scenes, set like this one in the Czech rural environment. We have a seller of jars, transported on the back of his donkey, who entertains himself at a well in amorous conversation with a girl, who in the meantime offers a tuft of grass to the docile beast. The painting is presented in a period frame.

Copper panels decorated with enamels. This is a 19th-century reproduction of the enamelled Cross of Paschal I (817-824), an important staurotheca in embossed and gilded copper, which contained within it minute fragments of the Cross of Christ, and which became part of the Treasure placed by Leo III (795-816) in the oratory called Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran. The Cross is made up of five panels, arranged in the shape of a Latin cross, on which seven episodes from the life of Jesus are depicted with lively enamel figures. In the upper panel are the Annunciation and the Visitation of Mary; in the centre panel is the Birth of Jesus; on the left is the Flight into Egypt and on the right is the Adoration of the Magi; and finally in the lower arm is the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple and the Baptism of Jesus. The panels are composed on a wooden base and presented in a glass case frame.