Antique Italian Mother and Child Oil Painting, Unframed, Circa 1900

Sold unframed, and the surface is the thing to understand before buying. A greyish purple veil sits over the whole upper two thirds of the picture, above and around the paint rather than in it, and it reads to me as discolored varnish. At the upper left corner there is an abrupt patch of clean blue sky and cream cloud that does not blend into the surrounding grey and has a harder edge than the painter would have given it. My reading is a cleaning test window, where somebody took the varnish down in one small area and stopped. I cannot prove that from looking, and I am telling you what I see rather than what I know. What it means practically is that the picture under that veil is probably brighter and cooler than the picture in these photographs, and a conservator could tell you what it would take to bring it forward. I have not had that done and I am not selling it as done.

No craquelure network is legible to me across the paint film, in the sky or in the thicker foliage passages. Whether fine cracking is present under the varnish and simply masked by it, I cannot say. Scattered small pale flecks sit across the sky and foreground, reading as surface accretion rather than paint loss. There is a dull bloom over parts of the sky.

The canvas itself is sound. No tears, no punctures, no patches. The tacking margins carry heavy uneven oxidation, brown and grey banding along the fold lines and greenish staining in patches, along with the rusted round holes from the original stretching. Along the top turnover there is fiber loss and loose threads, heaviest at the upper left corner, and a few fibers stand proud along the right edge. The extreme bottom edge shows abrasion and small paint loss where the canvas has been knocked at some point. All of this sits at the outer margins rather than in the picture.

The strainer is a plain light softwood, mitered at the corners, with no keys and no slots for keys. It is a later replacement, secured with staples that sit alongside and independent of the earlier tack holes. Hanging hardware is two modern D rings and braided wire, and is not original to anything.

#47