Actually of very little value

Several years ago I was in the local Salvation Army just before Chanukah and found what looked like a lovely etching of the city of Akko in Israel. The mat was discolored and the frame was a little ugly but it was a pretty piece.

It was done by Zvi Livni, a Polish born Israeli artist. When my husband cleaned out his parent’s house he found a portfolio of six prints of landscapes by Livni ,Livni Lithographs similar to this one. The prints in the portfolio had a sort of hairy quality to them there was a whole lot of muddy reds and greens that I didn’t find all that attractive.

I wondered if the print that we owned of Akko was in fact a tinted drawing rather than one of the hundreds if not thousands of prints available in the set.

We spent lots of time trying to figure it out.

The Livni portfolio is something that one can get inexpensively on eBay. You can often buy the entire set for $10.

The other night I decided to find out what we really had. I opened up the frame, removed the picture and saw that we had one of the prints from the portfolio. The previous owner had hung the print in a sunny spot. All of the muddy colors had been faded by the sun. I was left with a far simpler, cleaner image that was much more to my liking. Hurray for sun damage!

When I took apart the frame, I could see that both the mat and the cardboard spacer were really damaged. Given that relative low value of the piece, I didn’t want to invest a whole lot into reframing it.

Here is The Akko image as it was intended

I bought a ready made frame with a white mat and painted it to work better with the image.

I really prefer the sun damaged version.

I had hoped that my Salvation Army find was a treasure. It wasn’t.

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