Description
Head of a Woman – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani
Head of a Woman is a Modigliani head the museum places around 1920, and among our reproductions of famous paintings it is one of the smallest originals on this shelf: a head and neck alone, with no setting. 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
We see a head and a neck, closely cropped, with almost no room around them. Heavy dark hair falls in two masses beside the face, and a smooth fringe runs across the brow. The face is laid in a warm orange-ochre with pink and green touches, in short visible strokes. The eyes are dark narrow slits with no iris; the brows are strong and dark, the nose long with a slightly hooked bridge, the mouth small and closed. The neck is very long and runs down to bare shoulders at the lower edge. The ground is a dark olive-brown, roughly brushed, with a reddish patch at the lower left. Bare canvas shows along the left and top edges.
A head with no name, and why that is not a gap
The museum does not name this woman and does not attribute the portrait to anyone. With Modigliani that is not unusual: alongside commissioned portraits he painted heads that are studies of form rather than likenesses of a particular person. That is exactly what makes this subject different from a portrait — it is not someone looking at you, it is a shape. The museum dates the work with the word “vers”, around 1920: approximate, not documented. Modigliani died on 25 January 1920, so that dating falls in his last weeks or just before them, and we claim nothing sharper. The museum record notes exhibitions in Pisa in 2014–2015 and in Seoul in 2015.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas. ⚠️ The museum publishes no measurements — we checked both the French and the English version of its record, and both give the technique, the dating, the inventory number, the mode of acquisition and the exhibition history, but no size. The figure of 39 cm high and 26 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 1.1%, which is the only corroboration we have. We give width first, so on our page it reads 26 x 39 cm. The number AMVP 2676 and the Henry-Thomas donation of 1984 are the museum’s own. 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 original is tiny, but our subject is not tied to its measurement: with this head enlargement works well, because the strokes are broad and stay legible. A dark ground and one warm mass of face mean the picture does not compete with the room; it hangs well in a bedroom, on a stairwell, or in a narrow recess. When the canvas is finished we photograph it and send you the photograph for approval. You choose the frame in our 3D application, and our reproductions on canvas leave the atelier stretched and ready to hang. Every painting we make is hand-painted and never printed.
| Year of creation: | 1920 |
| Original size (width × height): | 26 x 39 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Musée d’art moderne de Paris (inv. AMVP 2676), donated by Henry-Thomas, 1984 |
This shelf carries a second head with no name — The Red Head, from the Centre Pompidou — and Woman with Blue Eyes, which this same museum holds.
