Amedeo Modigliani – Girl Standing in Black Pinafore

Girl Standing in Black Pinafore – hand-painted after Modigliani

Girl Standing in Black Pinafore is a Modigliani of 1918, painted in the south of France where illness and the war had sent him. Among our reproductions of famous paintings it is one of the quietest on this shelf. The original is held by the Kunstmuseum Basel. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.

What is on the canvas

The girl stands, shown to just below the hips, facing us with her head tipped slightly to her right. Dark brown hair is cut short and parted so that it falls across the forehead in two curved wings, with a small dark curl in front of each ear. The face is a warm ochre-apricot, the neck long; the eyes are brown almonds carrying pupils, the brows thin and arched, the nose long, the mouth small and dark red. She wears a dark blue-grey pinafore — deep slate rather than true black — with a scalloped edge across the chest, a straight band beneath it, three-quarter sleeves with turned cuffs, and a dark band low at the hips. Both arms hang at her sides and both pale pink hands show in the bottom corners. Behind her is a red-brown wooden chest at the left, a chair back at the right, and a grey-green wall above.

A child standing still

Modigliani painted children differently from adults. There is no posing here and no smile: the girl stands straight, lets her hands hang, and looks directly out. That stillness is what makes the picture serious even though the sitter is a child — and it is why this subject is one of the few Modiglianis that works in a child’s room and still holds its own in a living room. The signature modigliani stands at the upper right. Look at the scalloped edge across the chest of the pinafore: it is the only ornament on an otherwise plain dark shape, and the eye keeps returning to it.

The record of the original

The original is oil on canvas. ⚠️ We could not read the museum record: the published collection link redirects to a new page which serves no record at all without a browser. ⭐ So we looked the facts up twice, independently: the year 1918, the size 92.5 x 60.5 cm and the number G 1975.1 come from Wikidata, and they are confirmed by the Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur, a scholarly documentation database, which records the work as oil on canvas at the same size and the same year. Two independent sources agree. We assert nothing about ownership. ⚠️ The title differs between sources: Wikidata gives Mädchen in schwarzer Schürze, the Bildindex Mädchen mit schwarzer Schürze; we record both and declare neither wrong. We give width first, so on our page it reads 60.5 x 92.5 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 collected and quiet: a large dark shape of pinafore, a warm face above it, red-brown wood at the sides. A painting like this works in a child’s room, a bedroom or a hallway, where it should settle a wall rather than stir it. Because the figure is upright and narrow, the subject also suits the narrower walls and the spaces between doors, where wider subjects find no 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.

The Servant Girl, another standing young sitter, stands on this shelf, as does The Little Peasant from the same southern years.

• The Servant Girl
• The Little Peasant