MINOT — Ellen Pratt tried for years to learn about her reclusive neighbor, Lucilla Leonardi.

Pratt had seen a few of Leonardi’s paintings, colorful portraits and warm, Thomas Kinkade-like landscapes. But Leonardi rarely left her home and talked with few people. In July 2011, she died.

Only now, Pratt feels that she knows Leonardi.

“I never met her,” she said. “But I have her paintings.”

Last October, Pratt bought Leonardi’s cache of painting supplies and her entire collection of 120 paintings. It was her legacy.

The collection fills the walls of a large room above Pratt’s barn on Minot’s Harris Road. This Saturday and Sunday, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Pratt hopes to sell off 90 of the original oil-on-canvas works. The prices range from $125 to $200 each.

All proceeds will go to the Patrick Dempsey Center for Cancer Hope & Healing.

“I wanted to share this,” Pratt said, gazing at the rows of paintings. The images range from portraits of Native American women to scenes of bucolic cottages, fishing boats, faeries and sunflowers.

“I’ve taken out my favorites,” said Pratt, still overwhelmed by the sheer number of paintings. Some went to her house. Some went to her winter home in Florida or were given away as birthday gifts.

“This is a lifetime of work,” said Pratt, who has tried to piece together a biography of the artist she never met.

Leonardi was born in Rome in 1938 on the eve of World War II, she said. She came to the United States as the wife of a doctor, Joe Leonardi. The couple moved to Maine in the 1950s. They had one daughter, Elizabeth.

Following Lucilla’s death (Joe died a year earlier), a niece inherited the home on Harris Road. When she asked around if anyone was interested in the paintings, Pratt’s name arose.

They invited her to the house.

“The family had already taken the pieces they wanted,” she said.

Pratt wandered for the 45 minutes and offered to buy the lot (she declined to say how much she paid).

In three hours, she and her husband, Reggie, loaded up five pickups with stuff: paintings, frames, brushes, canvas and paint.

Pratt began to wade into the material.

She learned that Leonardi was a perfectionist. If she didn’t like the way a painting was going, she would start it over. Everything was documented.

“She was so, so organized,” she said.

And she was prolific.

“She painted all the time,” she said. “She must have.”

Her studio was small but her work was displayed throughout her large farmhouse, Pratt said.

“When I look at these paintings, I feel like I know who she was and how she thought,” she said. “She was like me.”

Pratt hopes people who attend the weekend art sale will take the time to read a short biography she wrote from the few details she could find.

She deserves to be remembered better than she was at the time of her death in 2011. She was 72 and had suffered a heart attack.

“There wasn’t even an obituary,” she said.

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