Caroline and Victor of Tomatis

A small boy gazes upward, and his sister rests her hand on the pedestal of a stone bust. These are Caroline and Victor, the youngest children of Count Carlo Tomatis and his wife Catarina, painted by Lampi during his months in Warsaw, 1788 to 1789. The bust and the dark background had long looked like a later addition by another hand. In 2016 the Belvedere's restorers looked beneath them using X-ray and infrared imaging. Under the paint were the face and upper body of the children's mother. Lampi seems to have left the group unfinished, and someone else painted over her, probably decades afterwards. The overpaint has not been removed, so the bust still stands on the canvas in the place where Catarina was.