Amedeo Modigliani – Adrienne (Woman with Bangs)

Adrienne (Woman with Bangs) – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani

Adrienne is a Modigliani portrait of 1917, and as a fine art reproduction it is one of the most likeable on this shelf: a young woman with a straight fringe, her hand raised to her cheek. The original is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.

What is on the canvas

The young woman is shown to the chest, turned three-quarters, against a red-brown ground broken at the upper right by an olive-green panel; the dark red back of a chair shows at the right. Dark brown hair is worn with a straight fringe across the forehead — the very feature that gave the work its name. The face is pale and oval, the neck long; the eyes are dark almonds carrying pupils, the brows finely drawn, the nose an outline and the mouth dark red. She wears a dark brown-olive garment off the shoulders. Her right hand is raised and rests against her cheek — the pink hand is the most recognisable thing in the picture. The signature stands at the upper right, in red.

A gesture worth looking at

In Modigliani the hands usually rest in the lap, or they are simply not there. Here it is different: the hand is lifted to the cheek and the face leans onto it. That is a gesture of thinking rather than of posing, and it is why this portrait feels more familiar than most on this shelf. The other thing worth noticing is the signature: it is written in red rather than black, and it sits at the upper right as part of the colour scheme, not as something added at the end.

The record of the original — and what we could not read

The original is oil on canvas. ⚠️ We could not read the museum record: the National Gallery of Art’s server refused us on all three routes we tried. That this is not a claim about whether the record exists we checked with a control — the same route with an impossible number returned the same refusal, so it is the server and not an absence. The year 1917, the size 55.3 x 38.1 cm and the number 1963.10.171 therefore come from the public Wikidata database and not from a museum sheet, and we say where we read them. We assert nothing about ownership. We give width first, so on our page it reads 38.1 x 55.3 cm. Of the sizes we offer, 38 x 55 cm follows the proportions of the original most closely; the others are standard formats and differ from it a little.

What you receive

Our painter works the picture by hand, oil on canvas, at the size you choose. The subject is warm and rounded: a red-brown ground, a cream face, a single pink hand. That is why it works in a living room or a bedroom, where a painting should warm the wall rather than demand attention. Because the face is large and softly painted, it also holds up at the smaller sizes, where many other subjects lose their expression. When the canvas is finished we photograph it and send you the photograph for approval before it leaves the studio. You choose the frame in our 3D application, and our reproductions on canvas leave the atelier stretched. Every painting we make is hand-painted and never printed.

Portrait of Chaïm Soutine, from the same Washington collection, stands on this shelf, and from the same year Portrait of Lunia Czechowska in a White Blouse.

• Portrait of Chaïm Soutine
• Portrait of Lunia Czechowska in a White Blouse