Mid-20th-Century Floral Watercolor by Lucia Bessi - 18½" x 25½"

This mid-20th-century floral watercolor by Italian artist Lucia Bessi depicts a loose arrangement of lilies and foliage, rendered in pale pinks, soft greens, touches of yellow and watery blue. The flowers seem almost to dissolve into the surrounding washes, giving the composition an ethereal, nearly abstract quality. Rather than describing every petal and leaf, Bessi suggests the bouquet through transparent layers of color and fluid brushwork, allowing areas of the paper to remain open and luminous.

Signed Lucia Bessi at the lower right, the watercolor is presented in a simple wooden frame with a moss-green velvet mount and fine gilt inner border, colors that echo the painting without competing with its delicacy. The paper has shifted slightly within the frame and would likely benefit from reframing or remounting. Born in Trieste in 1929, Lucia Maria Bessi studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice under Guido Cadorin, graduating in 1952. She began exhibiting that same year in regional and national shows and is documented as both a painter and engraver. Her work was included in the 1956 Premio Burano, and she also held a solo exhibition at the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice that year.

Its lightness and softly diffused palette would work particularly well in a bedroom, dressing room or sitting room, where the lightness of the watercolor would echo the softer textures and more intimate atmosphere of the room.