Amedeo Modigliani – Girl with a Polka-Dot Blouse

Girl with a Polka-Dot Blouse is a canvas of 1919 held by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia under accession number BF180, where it hangs in Room 11. A young woman is shown at three-quarter length in a white blouse scattered with blue dots and tied at the throat with a soft bow. With us it is made as a hand-painted copy, oil on canvas, to order, in eight sizes or in a size you give us; before dispatch we send you a photograph of the finished canvas.

Girl with a Polka-Dot Blouse – Amedeo Modigliani

What is on the canvas?

The young woman is shown at three-quarter length and set square to the viewer. Auburn hair is parted at the centre and drawn back. The face is a long oval described by a single decisive line, the nose straight, the mouth small and red. The eyes are blue and they carry an iris — worth saying, because Modigliani so often leaves the eye an empty almond, and here there is a gaze. The white blouse is sprinkled with small blue dots, a pale blue bow sits under the throat, and the sleeves narrow at the wrists. The lower half of the canvas is taken by a full mauve-pink skirt, with both hands folded low in the lap. The ground is grey-green, a vertical band runs down the left edge, and the back of a wooden chair shows at the right.

Why are the dots worth noticing?

Modigliani’s canvases are usually smooth: one colour for the dress, one for the wall, no ornament anywhere. This one is not. The dots on the blouse are set down one at a time, and they give the picture a rhythm that is rare in his work; the bow is the only place where the paint opens into a soft fold. The pattern is also what named the work — the museum lists it in French as Jeune fille au corsage à pois, the girl in the polka-dot bodice. It was painted in 1919, the last full year of the painter’s life, when the faces are at their calmest and the drawn line at its most certain. The circle the canvas was made in is the one we now call the École de Paris.

The record of the original, and how the canvas travelled

The original is oil on canvas and the Barnes Foundation measures it 115.6 cm high by 73 cm wide; we give width first, so on our page it reads 73 × 115.6 cm. The year 1919, the medium and the accession number BF180 are the museum’s own. The museum also publishes the ownership history, and it is short: the canvas was possibly with the dealer Léopold Zborowski in Paris by 1923, and in June 1923 Albert C. Barnes bought it from the dealer Paul Guillaume. The museum hedges that first step, and so do we — a possibly in the record stays a possibly on our page. What is certain is that the picture left Europe in 1923, four years after it was painted, and has been in Philadelphia ever since. The work also has its own Wikidata entry.

The motif among the painter’s works

Both of the dealers named in that short chain are themselves sitters on this shelf: Paul Guillaume, who sold the picture, and Portrait of Léopold Zborowski, who may have held it first. That is how tight the circle was — the men who traded the canvases also sat for them. From the same last years the shelf carries Jeanne Hébuterne in a Yellow Sweater, and from 1915 the very differently built Madam Pompadour, whose broad hat does for that canvas what the dotted blouse does for this one. The whole selection is in the Amedeo Modigliani gallery, and we have written a longer article about the painter.

How is our hand-painted version made?

A painter paints it, with a brush, in oil on canvas, to your order. Every canvas painting takes some weeks, and each copy comes out slightly its own; that is the consequence of a person working rather than a machine. On this motif the dots are the test. They are not a stencil and not a print: each one is a touch of the brush, and they have to sit on the folds of the blouse rather than on a flat white field, or the pattern turns into wallpaper and the fabric stops being fabric. The blue of the bow and the blue of the dots are close but not the same, and that difference is worth keeping. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished canvas and approve it. It is never a print.

Which size for which wall?

For this motif we suggest 70 × 110 cm. The picture is tall and narrow, so it belongs where a wide painting has no room: a narrow alcove, the wall beside a door, the strip between two windows. For a main wall 90 × 140 cm carries it well, and of the sizes we offer 120 × 190 cm follows the proportions of the original most closely. In a small room 40 × 60 cm is enough. If you want a post-impressionist painting in a size that is not on the list, we make it to order.

Frequently asked questions

Where is the original?

In the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Room 11, accession number BF180.

Who is the young woman?

The museum’s record does not name her, and neither do we. The title describes what she is wearing, not who she was.

Is Jeune fille au corsage à pois the same work?

Yes. That is the French title the museum lists alongside the English one; it is the same canvas.

How closely does it follow the original’s proportions?

The original measures 73 × 115.6 cm. The closest of our sizes is 120 x 190 cm, which departs from the original’s proportions by 0.01%.

• Subject: a young woman at three-quarter length in a white blouse with blue dots, a pale bow at the throat, a mauve-pink skirt, hands folded low
• Original: 73 × 115.6 cm, oil on canvas, 1919, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, inv. BF180
• Ours: hand-painted oil on canvas, eight sizes or a custom size, with a photograph to approve before dispatch
• Worth knowing: the eyes carry an iris, which Modigliani usually leaves out, and the dotted blouse is a pattern he almost never painted

The eyes on this canvas are painted without pupils. We counted all 76 Modigliani works on this shelf: 53 are like that, 17 are not – work by work.