Description
Léon Indenbaum – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani
Léon Indenbaum is a Modigliani portrait of 1916, and among our reproductions on canvas it is one of the most reserved on this shelf: a man’s face seen frontally, with no setting, in greys and greens. The sitter’s name is painted across the top of the canvas. The original is in the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, and ours is made as a fine art reproduction, hand-painted in oil on canvas.
What is on the canvas
The man is shown to the chest, frontally, and fills almost the whole panel. The forehead is high, pale and domed, the hair receding at both temples with a dark tuft standing at the centre of the hairline. The face is long and narrow, the eyes heavy-lidded almonds with no iris, the nose long and straight, the mouth small and pink, the ears prominent. The neck is long and runs into a grey-green high-necked garment. The ground is grey-green and divided: a darker band at the left, a lighter field at the right. Across the top, in large letters, runs the sitter’s surname, cut into two halves by the head. The signature stands at the lower right in capitals.
Who the sitter was
The collection’s own record says that Léon Indenbaum was a sculptor, born in Vilnius and schooled in Ukrainian art schools, who came to Paris in 1911 and probably met Modigliani in the artistic circles of Montparnasse. The word “probably” is the collection’s, not ours, and we do not turn it into certainty. The portrait belongs to Modigliani’s practice of painting friends and colleagues, and the surname across the top marks the sitter out explicitly as one of them. One oddity is worth saying plainly: the collection’s page contradicts itself about the year of the sculptor’s death, giving two different ones in two places, so we print no death year at all.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas. The collection measures it 54.6 cm high and 45.7 cm wide; we give width first, so on our page it reads 45.7 x 54.6 cm, and the specification names the order in words as well. The figures come from the Pearlman Collection’s own record: the year 1916, the medium oil on canvas, the number L.1988.62.19, signed at the lower right, the name inscribed across the top. The letter L marks a loan — the painting belongs to the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation and is housed by the museum at Princeton. We could not read the Princeton museum’s own pages, which refuse our requests, so we state nothing from them. The chain of ownership is named: from the sculptor himself in 1916, through Georges Chéron and an auction at the Hôtel Drouot in July 1937, to the Galerie Zak and to Henry Pearlman by 1949.
What you receive
Our painter works the picture by hand, oil on canvas, at the size you choose. The subject is nearly square and quiet, with no strong colour in it, so it works where a painting should not raise its voice: a study, an office, a library, an entrance hall. The grey-green scale sits well with wood and with earth-coloured walls, while on a very dark wall it loses some of its calm. 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. Every painting we make is hand-painted and never printed.
| Year of creation: | 1916 |
| Original size (width × height): | 45.7 x 54.6 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum (inv. L.1988.62.19) |
From the same collection this shelf also carries Jean Cocteau — the neighbouring number, L.1988.62.18 — and beside it the portrait of Léon Bakst, another man painted at his trade.
