Description
Woman with Earrings – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani
Woman with Earrings is a Modigliani the museum places around 1917, and among our reproductions of famous paintings it is one of the most direct on this shelf: a face seen frontally, a long neck, and the pair of coral earrings the work is named for. The original is held by the Musée d’art moderne de Paris. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.
What is on the canvas
The sitter is shown to the chest, frontally, against a mottled grey wall with a greenish cast at the upper left. Dark hair is parted at the centre and cut short about the face. The face is long and oval in a warm ochre, with two strong pink-red patches on the cheeks; the eyes are not symmetrical — the left is dark and carries a pupil, the right is paler and flatter. The nose is long, the mouth small and red. Coral-orange drop earrings hang at both ears, the very feature that gives the work its name. The neck is very long and runs into a dark V-necked garment closed at the point by one small round button. The signature stands at the upper right.
What the museum says about the attribution, and why we repeat it
The museum adds a note to its record which we do not hide: the work was long attributed to Modigliani, and today it is thought to be a genuine one. That is two things at once — that the attribution was uncertain for a long time, and that the museum now considers it authentic — and we report both as the museum words them. We do not turn “is thought” into certainty. For a buyer it changes nothing about what arrives: ours is a hand-painted reproduction of this canvas however the scholarly discussion settles. We say it because it is part of the record, and because a buyer is entitled to read what the museum reads.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas. ⚠️ The museum publishes no measurements — its record is otherwise full: the dating, the technique, the inventory number AMVP 1400, the mode of acquisition (a bequest from Dr Maurice Girardin, 2 July 1953) and a CC0 licence, but no size. The figure of 65 cm high and 43.5 cm wide therefore comes from the public Wikidata database and not from a museum sheet, and we say where we read it. The proportions of the photograph of the work agree with it to within two per cent, which is the only corroboration we have. We give width first, so on our page it reads 43.5 x 65 cm. The museum dates the work to “around 1917”. The proportions of our canvas follow the original.
What you receive
Our painter works the picture by hand, oil on canvas, at the size you choose. The subject is small at its original measurement and quiet in colour — a grey wall, a warm face, two orange points of earring — so it takes enlargement well and works on almost any wall. The earrings are the only bright accents, which is why the picture needs no heavy frame. 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.
| Year of creation: | 1917 |
| Original size (width × height): | 43.5 x 65 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Musée d’art moderne de Paris (inv. AMVP 1400), bequest of Dr Maurice Girardin, 1953 |
Two more canvases from the same museum stand on this shelf — Head of a Woman and Woman with Blue Eyes — three Paris pictures held by one house.
