Amedeo Modigliani – Boy in a Striped Sweater

Boy in a Striped Sweater – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani

Boy in a Striped Sweater is a Modigliani of 1918, and among our reproductions on canvas it is one of the few portraits of a child: the boy sits in a chair with his hands folded in his lap. The original is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Ours is a hand-painted fine art reproduction, oil on canvas.

What is on the canvas

The boy sits in a chair whose red-orange back shows at the left, with a pale tan vertical band beyond it. His auburn hair is swept up from a pale oval face with pink cheeks; the eyes are pale blue-grey almonds and they carry pupils, the mouth is small and orange, the ears large. He wears a dark teal-blue jacket open over a white and blue horizontally striped sweater with a dark blue collar and a long dark placket, and dark blue trousers below. Both hands are folded in his lap with the fingers interlaced. The ground is a pale blue-grey wall carrying faint drawn lines. The signature stands at the upper right.

What the museum says, and what it does not

The Metropolitan publishes its record through a public interface and it is terse: title, the year 1918, oil on canvas, the measurements, the number 1999.363.56, and one line of acquisition — the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998. It publishes no ownership history before that, so we state none: neither that it was clear nor that it was troubled. The museum also does not mention a signature. It is there on the photograph, though: modigliani at the upper right, and we read it ourselves before opening the record. Where we can see more than the institution publishes, we give it as our own observation and not as theirs.

The record of the original, and what our picture is

The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 91.4 cm high and 54.6 cm wide — a narrow, tall canvas; we give width first, so on our page it reads 54.6 x 91.4 cm, and the specification names the order in words as well. ⚠️ Here we must be exact: our sizes are not in the same proportion as the original. The original is markedly tall and narrow, and the formats we paint this subject in are about 4% less elongated. The figure therefore sits a little wider in our canvas than it does in the original. We do not pass over that, and we do not claim a match we do not make — the original’s proportions are reported as the museum gives them, and our picture is described as what it is.

What you receive

Our painter works the picture by hand, oil on canvas, at a size you choose from our range. The subject is calm and friendly, with no harsh colour in it: a teal-blue jacket, a white stripe and one warm plane of face. That is why it works in a child’s room, a hallway or a dining room — anywhere a painting should warm the wall rather than demand attention. Because the boy is seated and looks straight out, the picture takes being close to and hung low. 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. Every painting we make is hand-painted and never printed.

This shelf also carries The Boy and The Young Apprentice — young male sitters from the same years, painted with the same steadiness.

• The Boy
• The Young Apprentice