Signed and dated l.l.: H.M.Livens/20

Watercolour over pencil on brown paper,

Today Livens is principally known for his friendship with Vincent van Gogh who he met whilst working under Charles Verlat at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp. Van Gogh later wrote to Livens “I liked your colour, your ideas on art and literature and I add, most of all your personality…that neither your colour nor mine as it is developing itself, is exactly the same as their theories”. He excelled at London street scenes like this,  providing illustrations for E. V. Lucas’s London Revisited in 1916.