Description
Amedeo Modigliani – Portrait of Juan Gris (1915)
Portrait of Juan Gris is a 1915 oil on canvas by Amedeo Modigliani. The canvas is 38.3 cm wide and 55.2 cm high. We supply it hand-painted in oil on canvas; our reproductions on canvas are painted stroke by stroke, made to order, and never printed.
What is on the canvas
The portrait shows a man to the chest, turned slightly to one side, his head inclined forward. The face is narrow and elongated, with a high forehead, dark hair and heavy eyebrows; the eyes are painted dark and attentive. He wears a dark jacket and a shirt with a lighter collar. The ground is neutral and divided into a few quiet planes that say nothing about the room. The canvas is small, so everything is concentrated in the face: there is no ornament in it and no pose, only the closely observed head of a man the painter knew well.
Where the original is today
The original is held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York under accession number 67.187.85; it entered the museum in 1967 as the bequest of Adelaide Milton de Groot. While preparing this page we corrected the measurements: our listing previously read 38 by 55.5 centimetres, whereas the museum record gives 38.3 by 55.2 centimetres. The difference is small, but we print the museum’s figure because it is the first-hand one. A value of 38.1 by 54.9 centimetres also circulates online; both agree with the proportions of the photograph, so what decides here is not geometry but the source. The year 1915 and the medium, oil on canvas, were checked and are unchanged.
A curiosity: a painter painting a painter
Juan Gris was a Spanish painter and one of the leading figures of Cubism, who lived in Paris in the same circle as Modigliani. This portrait is therefore not a commission from a wealthy citizen but the likeness of a colleague — and it shows. Modigliani made no attempt at anything representative: there is no background to tell you what the sitter does for a living, no brush in the hand, no studio. What is also interesting is that the two painters worked in entirely different languages — Gris took an object apart into planes, Modigliani compressed it into a single elongated shape. That is exactly what makes this portrait a quiet meeting of two opposite ways of looking.
What you receive
Our painter works the reproduction in oil on canvas at the size you choose; the proportions follow the original, so an upright format stays upright. Because the original is small, this portrait is often ordered larger. When the painting 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, which draws it realistically onto the picture, and on request we will place the painting onto a photograph of your own wall before you buy. Every fine art reproduction we make is hand-painted, never printed.
| Year of creation: | 1915 |
| Original size: | 38.3 x 55.2 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Among Modigliani’s portraits of his artist friends this is one of the most collected in feeling. It works well in an office or a study, where the seriousness of the face is no disadvantage.
