Description
The Servant Girl – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani portrait
The Servant Girl is a portrait of 1916, and among reproductions of famous paintings it carries all its weight in the face: the sitter is shown to the chest, with no prop and no room, against a dark green wall. The Kunsthaus Zürich lists it under the French title La Petite Servante and has held it since 1927, a gift of the Ulrico Hoepli Foundation.
What is on the canvas
The young woman is shown frontally and fills almost the whole surface. Dark hair is cut in a short bob with a blunt fringe low on the forehead. The lids are heavy and darkly outlined and the eyes are nearly closed — she is not asleep, she is looking down. The nose is long, the mouth small and orange-red. The throat is a saturated orange-ochre and is the warmest plane on the canvas; below it a dark blue-black high-necked garment begins and almost merges with the ground. The ground is dark green, worked with visible strokes and a little lighter towards the left. The signature modigliani stands at the upper left and is painted in red.
What the museum knows about this canvas — and what it is called
The museum record states that the picture is signed at the upper left in red, and that the back of the canvas carries Modigliani. 3 Joseph Bara. Paris. — the address of the painter’s Paris studio at the time. The work is entered in both of the major catalogues of Modigliani’s output, as Ceroni 124 and as Patani 127. Besides the French title the museum also lists it as La servetta, Das Dienstmädchen and The Servant-girl; the name therefore describes an occupation rather than a person, and none of the records names the sitter.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 73 cm high and 54 cm wide; we give width first, so on our page it reads 54 x 73 cm. The figures come from the Kunsthaus Zürich’s own online collection: the year 1916, the medium oil on canvas, inventory number 1851, acquired in 1927 as a gift of the Ulrico Hoepli Foundation. The museum states that the digitisation of its inventory is still in progress and publishes no ownership history for this work, so we do not state one either. Of the sizes we offer for our reproductions on canvas, 60 x 80 cm follows the proportions of the original most closely; the others are standard formats and differ from it a little.
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 dark and self-contained, so it holds a room with warm light: a dining room, a wall beside bookshelves, or a corner where a pale picture would carry no weight. 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): | 54 x 73 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Kunsthaus Zürich (inv. 1851), donated by the Ulrico Hoepli Foundation, 1927 |
The museum knows the year, the measurements, both catalogue numbers and even the studio address on the back. Nobody knows the girl’s name — only the name of her job survived.
