Description
Léon Bakst – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani portrait
Léon Bakst is a portrait Modigliani painted in 1917, and as a fine art reproduction it works for exactly the reason the original does: there is nothing in it but a head, a pair of shoulders and a grey-green wall. The original hangs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, in the Chester Dale Collection. The sitter was not a casual acquaintance. Léon Bakst designed the sets and costumes for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and taught Paris what a stage could look like when it burned with colour. Modigliani painted him with almost none of it.
What is on the canvas
The man is shown at bust length, facing us squarely. The skull is high and bald, carried in a warm pink-ochre that lightens towards the crown. Heavy dark brows sit over pale blue almond eyes set wide apart. The nose is long and straight, and beneath it a full drooping moustache half hides a small dark mouth. A deep blue cravat fills the throat in a soft V, and that blue is the only place where the picture raises its voice. The jacket is black, its lapels lifted in salmon pink so that the face stays the brightest thing in the frame. The ground is grey-green, closed along the right edge by a dark red-brown vertical band. The signature modigliani stands at the upper right and can be read on the original with the naked eye.
The man who dressed the Ballets Russes
Léon Bakst (1866–1924) was a painter and stage designer who changed the way the European stage looked. His costumes and sets for the Ballets Russes were opulent, saturated with pattern and colour, and that opulence is what the world remembers him for. Modigliani went the other way. None of Bakst’s trade appears on the canvas: no fabric, no pattern, no stage. What is left is the man, and the painter grants him the dignity of a steady look. The museum record notes that the painting stayed with Bakst himself and was his until he died in 1924; only then does it travel through Paris to the collector Chester Dale, who bought it on 13 April 1928 and bequeathed it to the gallery in 1963.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 55.3 cm high and 33 cm wide; we state width before height, so on our page it reads 33 x 55.3 cm. The figures come from the National Gallery of Art’s own open data — the museum gives 1917 as a firm year rather than an approximation, the medium as oil on canvas, the collection as the Chester Dale Collection and the accession number as 1963.10.173. We could not read the museum’s own website, which refused our request, so everything quoted here comes from its published dataset instead. Our canvases are reproductions on canvas in the proportion of the original, not at its size.
What you receive
We paint the picture by hand in oil on canvas, to order, in the size you choose. This motif suits a living room or a study precisely because it is nearly monochrome: a grey wall, a black jacket and a single plane of blue at the throat. Before dispatch we send you a photograph of the finished canvas so you can see what is coming. It is a hand-painted painting, never a print.
| Year of creation: | 1917 |
| Original size (width × height): | 33 x 55.3 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | National Gallery of Art, Washington, Chester Dale Collection, inv. 1963.10.173 |
Bakst spent his working life dressing other people’s bodies in colour. Modigliani painted him with no costume, no stage and almost no colour at all — and of everything Bakst made, this quiet face is the part that stayed most his own.
