Description
Jeanne Seated with Her Arm on the Chair Back – hand-painted reproductions on canvas
Jeanne Hébuterne was Modigliani’s companion and the model for almost all his last portraits. Among our reproductions on canvas this one of 1918 is among the calmest. The original is held by the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.
What is on the canvas
Jeanne is seated, shown to below the hips, her body turned to her right and her head tipped the same way. Chestnut hair is drawn up into a high rounded bun at the crown. The face is very long and a pale cream, the neck equally long; the eyes are pale blue-grey almonds with no pupils at all — entirely blank, exactly what people mean when they say a Modigliani face looks inward. The brows are thin, the nose long, the mouth small and red. She wears a dark blue-black dress off both shoulders with long sleeves. Her right arm is raised and laid along the top rail of an orange-brown ladder-back chair, the hand hanging over it with long separated fingers. Her left hand rests low in her lap. A red-orange skirt sweeps diagonally across the lower half. At the left a pale blue-grey wall, at the right a large red-brown door.
The arm on the chair back
The title is not decorative: it describes the gesture that tells this canvas apart from every other portrait of Jeanne. The arm is neither in her lap nor at her side but raised and laid on the chair back, which gives the body a diagonal the eye follows from the hand down to the red skirt. That is what makes this picture less rigid than the earlier portraits. The other thing worth noticing is the eyes: there are no pupils in them. Modigliani did this when he knew a sitter well — as if to say that you do not draw someone by looking into their eyes.
The record of the original — and what we could not read
The original is oil on canvas. ⚠️ We could not read the museum record: the Norton Simon Museum’s server refused us. We took the control first, before writing anything about this collection at all — the same route with an accession number that cannot exist returned the same refusal, so it is the server and not a missing record. The year 1918, the size 101 x 65.7 cm and the number M.1975.13.2.P therefore come from the public Wikidata database, and we say where we read them. We assert nothing about ownership. ⚠️ The work is also catalogued as Portrait of the Artist’s Wife and simply as Jeanne Hébuterne; we have kept the description of the pose, because on a shelf holding nine Jeannes it is the only thing that really tells it apart. We give width first, so on our page it reads 65.7 x 101 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 carried by three large opposed fields: the dark blue dress, the red skirt and the red-brown door, all settled by the cool grey-blue wall at the left. A painting like this works in a living room or a bedroom, where it can take a larger format and have space around it. Because the figure is tall and narrow, it also suits narrower walls and the spaces beside doors. 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 every fine art reproduction we make is hand-painted and never printed.
| Year of creation: | 1918 |
| Original size (width × height): | 65.7 x 101 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena (inv. M.1975.13.2.P) |
Jeanne Hébuterne in a White Chemise and Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne I also stand on this shelf.
