Description
Jean Cocteau – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani portrait
Jean Cocteau is a portrait of the poet painted in 1916, and among our reproductions on canvas it is unusually orderly for a Modigliani: the sitter is upright in a red-brown armchair, in a blue suit and a bow tie, against a blue wall. The original belongs to the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection and is on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum.
What is on the canvas
A young man sits square to us in a deep armchair whose red-brown wings rise on both sides. The head is long and slightly tilted, the dark hair swept back from a high forehead, the brows drawn into arches, the eyes dark almonds, the cheeks pink. The neck is very long and carries a white collar and a black bow tie. The suit is blue-black and three-piece, with a white pocket square showing. Both hands are folded low in the lap. Behind him a blue wall is divided into panels, interrupted at the upper right by a brown band. The signature modigliani stands at the upper left.
The poet the room did not like
The collection’s own record tells how the sitting came about. In the spring of 1916 Pablo Picasso brought the poet Jean Cocteau to the painters and poets who gathered at Moïse Kisling’s studio in Montparnasse. Cocteau was a Right Bank poet and he irritated the Left Bank company: the poet Pierre Reverdy recalled afterwards that Cocteau talked incessantly, his voice like the rain beating on the roof, while everybody ignored him. Both Modigliani and Kisling painted him. It was Kisling who later sold this canvas to the owner of the Café Rotonde, and from there begins the long chain of named owners the collection publishes.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas. The collection measures it 100.4 cm high and 81.3 cm wide; we give width first, so on our page it reads 81.3 x 100.4 cm. The figures come from the Pearlman Collection’s own record: the year 1916, the medium oil on canvas, the number L.1988.62.18, signed at the upper left. The letter L marks a loan — the painting belongs to the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation and is housed by the museum at Princeton. We could not read the Princeton museum’s own pages, which refused our request, so we state nothing from them. The ownership chain is named throughout, from Cocteau himself through Zborowski and Paul Guillaume to New York by 1944 and to Henry Pearlman by 1951. Among reproductions of famous paintings, a chain that complete is unusual.
What you receive
We paint the picture by hand in oil on canvas, to order, in the size you choose, including a bespoke size. The motif is modern and geometric: the blue of the suit, the blue of the wall and a single red mass of armchair. It therefore works in an office, a study or an entrance hall, where a picture is asked to carry order rather than mood. Before dispatch we send you a photograph of the finished canvas. It is a hand-painted reproduction, never a print.
| Year of creation: | 1916 |
| Original size (width × height): | 81.3 x 100.4 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum (inv. L.1988.62.18) |
Cocteau was famous for talking more than anyone else in the room. Modigliani painted him with his mouth shut and his hands in his lap — and that is how he stayed.
