Description
Madam Pompadour – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani portrait
Madam Pompadour is a portrait of 1915 and one of the few Modigliani paintings that carries its own date: Madam / Pompadour / 1915 is inscribed in the paint at the lower centre, and the signature modigliani stands at the lower right. Among our reproductions on canvas it is a picture that lives on a single gesture — an enormous dark hat that drops across the brow and takes a third of the canvas with it. The original is at the Art Institute of Chicago, in the Joseph Winterbotham Collection.
What is on the canvas
The woman is shown at bust length, turned slightly to her left. The hat is large and dark, with a wide soft brim tipped over the brows and a lighter band around the crown. Auburn hair shows at the temples. The face is a long mask in pink-ochre, and the eyes are blank almonds without pupils — Modigliani often leaves them sightless when he wants a face to stay a shape rather than become a person. The mouth is small and dark. The long neck carries a dark blue-green bodice. The ground is a blue-grey and empty. Both the inscription and the signature can be read on the original with the naked eye.
The title is a joke about a hat, not a claim about the sitter
Madame de Pompadour died in 1764, so the title is not an identification of the woman sitting for the painter. The name is Modigliani’s joke about the hat — that wide, grand piece of millinery that lends the sitter a reserved, almost courtly air. The museum record names no sitter, so neither do we; the literature often proposes Beatrice Hastings, but that is a supposition and not a museum fact. We also keep the museum’s spelling — Madam, without the final e, exactly as the painter wrote it on the canvas.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 61.1 cm high and 50.2 cm wide; we give width first, so on our page it reads 50.2 x 61.1 cm. The figures were read directly from the Art Institute of Chicago’s own record: the year 1915, the medium oil on canvas, the Joseph Winterbotham Collection, accession number 1938.217. The year needs no attribution here — the painting carries it written on its face. The museum’s chain of owners is named and unbroken: Paul Guillaume bought it directly from the artist by 1916; by December 1920 it was with Léopold Zborowski; in March 1933 it passed at auction in Paris; and by the end of 1937 it had reached New York. Among reproductions of famous paintings from these years, an unbroken chain of named owners is rare.
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 rewards a wall above a sideboard or in an entrance hall because it reads at a distance: the dark mass of the hat carries across a room, while the face only opens up close. Before dispatch we send you a photograph of the finished canvas. It is a hand-painted painting, never a print.
| Year of creation: | 1915 |
| Original size (width × height): | 50.2 x 61.1 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Art Institute of Chicago, Joseph Winterbotham Collection, inv. 1938.217 |
The painter wrote a name and a year onto this canvas, but not a sitter. A century later we know when it was made and what it is called — but not who the woman under the hat was.
