Amedeo Modigliani – Boy in Short Pants

Boy in Short Pants – a hand-painted fine art reproduction after Modigliani

Boy in Short Pants is a Modigliani of 1918, painted in the south of France. As a fine art reproduction it is one of the few on this shelf showing a child seated in an armchair. The original is held by the Dallas Museum of Art. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.

What is on the canvas

The boy sits in a red-brown upholstered armchair, shown to mid-thigh, facing us. Curly ginger-blond hair springs out around a pale oval face; the eyes are pale grey-blue with faintly marked pupils under thin brows, the nose long, and the mouth a small bright red shape — the one strong colour in the face. He wears a rust-orange jacket with a notched collar, two round buttons and a belt with a round buckle at the waist, over a white shirt; below are dark navy short trousers and bare pink legs. Both hands are clasped in his lap with the fingers interlaced. The chair back rises at the left; a dark red panel sits low at the right. Behind him a salmon-pink wall between grey-green vertical bands. The signature modigliani stands at the upper right.

A child sitting like an adult

Modigliani painted children without sweetening them. This boy sits in the armchair the way a grown man would: back straight, hands folded, looking directly out. The short trousers and the bare knees are the only things that say he is a child — everything else is serious. That contrast is what makes the subject both interesting and easy to live with. What holds the colour together is the rust-orange jacket filling almost the whole middle of the canvas, with the dark blue trousers and the red-brown chair set against it.

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 museum’s page assembles itself in a browser and without one it serves us nothing but the museum’s name. That this says nothing about the record we checked with a control — an entirely invented artwork reference returns exactly the same page. The year 1918, the size 99.69 x 64.77 cm and the number 1977.1 therefore come from the public Wikidata database, and we say where we read them. We assert nothing about ownership. ⚠️ We also checked that our own file shows the whole painting rather than a photograph of the framed picture on a wall: the proportions of the file agree with the museum measurement to within half a percent. We give width first, so on our page it reads 64.8 x 99.7 cm. Of the sizes we offer, 130 x 200 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 undemanding: an orange jacket in the middle, a red-brown chair around it, a pink wall behind. A painting like this works in a child’s room, a living room or a hallway, where it should be friendly rather than solemn. Because the figure is upright and compact, it holds up well at the middle sizes, where the face still reads from across a room. 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.

Boy in a Striped Sweater and The Little Peasant, young sitters of the same years, also stand on this shelf.

• Boy in a Striped Sweater
• The Little Peasant