- 255
Alessandro Longhi
Description
- Alessandro Longhi
- Portrait of a lady, three-quarter length standing, holding a rose and a boy holding an apple beside her
- oil on canvas
Provenance
Catalogue Note
Despite being the son of the highly successful genre painter Pietro Longhi, Alessandro enjoyed his own artistic repute by specialising in portraiture. He was apprenticed as a young man to Giuseppe Nogari, one of the better-known Venetian portraitists of the 18th century, but Alessandro's portraits have more in common with his father's pictorial style; so much so that their attribution has often been confused in the past. In 1759 Alessandro was elected a member of the Accademia di Pittori, for which he painted a series of imaginary portraits of the great Venetian Renaissance artists.
Though much of his output consists of 'official' portraits of Venetian senators and lawyers, his informal portraits - such as this one - demonstrate his sensitivity in portraying the Venetian aristocracy. The female sitter's lively expression and the little boy's gesture are convincingly captured through Alessandro's painterly brushwork.