Description
The Painter Krémègne – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani
The Painter Krémègne is a Modigliani portrait of 1916, and among our reproductions on canvas it is one of the most reserved on this shelf: the sitter is in an armchair with his hands open on his knees. The original is held by the Kunstmuseum Bern. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.
What is on the canvas
The sitter is in an armchair, shown to the hips, frontal and slightly turned. The forehead is high and domed in a warm orange-pink, the hair receding at the temples and dark at the sides. The face is long and narrow, the eyes pale blue-grey almonds under heavy lids with barely visible pupils, the nose long and straight, and a small dark moustache sits above a small mouth. He wears a dark green-black buttoned overcoat over a pale blue-white collar. Both hands rest open on his knees, palms down and fingers spread, painted in the same orange-pink as the face — the most unusual thing in the picture. Behind him a patterned red-brown chair back spreads out; at the right a dark band and a patch of blue-grey light. The signature stands at the upper right, in red.
A painter painted by a painter
The title names the sitter and says what he was: Krémègne was a painter, one of the Montparnasse circle Modigliani painted from among his own. We claim nothing further about him here, because nothing further could be read. What is worth looking at instead is how he is painted: not as a mask with closed eyes, as many Modigliani portraits are, but with a gaze you can meet, and with hands that are not hidden in the lap but laid open on the knees. That is the posture of a man sitting and waiting — and it is what makes this portrait more personal than most.
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 Kunstmuseum Bern online catalogue served us no entry for this work, and the provenance document the museum itself references was refused by its server. The year 1916, the size 81 x 55 cm and the number G 81.036 therefore come from the public Wikidata database and not from a museum sheet, and we say where we read them. We assert nothing about the chain of ownership — neither that it is clear nor that it is troubled — because we did not see it. The proportions of the photograph of the work agree with the stated size to within two per cent, which is the only check left to us. We give width first, so on our page it reads 55 x 81 cm. 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 subject is dark and warm: a red-brown chair, a green-black coat, and three light planes — the face and the two hands. That is why it works on a light wall, where the red-brown can open out, and in a room where a painting is allowed to be serious: a study, a library, a dining room. 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 our fine art reproduction leaves the atelier stretched and ready to hang. Every painting we make is hand-painted and never printed.
| Year of creation: | 1916 |
| Original size (width × height): | 55 x 81 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Kunstmuseum Bern (inv. G 81.036) |
Viking Eggeling and Léon Indenbaum stand on this shelf too — men of the same Paris trade, painted in the same years.
