Description
Amedeo Modigliani – Madame Hanka Zborowska (1918), a hand-painted fine art reproduction
The portrait of Hanka Zborowska is a canvas of 1918 held by the São Paulo Museum of Art. The sitter is the wife of Léopold Zborowski, the dealer who supported Modigliani from 1916 and found him both a studio and his models. We make it as a hand-painted fine art reproduction, oil on canvas, to order; among our reproductions of famous paintings it is one of the most openly stylised portraits on the shelf.
What is on the canvas
The figure is seated and shown at three-quarter length. Chestnut hair is drawn back off a high forehead and pinned. The face is a long oval, the eyes almond-shaped; the sitter’s left reads green. The neck is extraordinarily long — even by this painter’s standard — and it is the neck that carries the whole composition. Under a dark navy jacket with a deep V an olive-green blouse shows. The ground is olive-green, closed at the right by a darker band and the back of a chair. The signature is upper right. The colour range is narrow: green, navy, ochre flesh, and nothing else.
The Zborowski household
Léopold Zborowski was a Polish poet turned art dealer and, from 1916, Modigliani’s principal support. He paid for the studio, bought the colours, found the models, and in December 1917 mounted the only solo exhibition the painter had in his lifetime. Hanka Zborowska, his wife, sat for Modigliani several times; these portraits are among his most collected in feeling, perhaps because the sitter was not a client but the woman of the house where the painter often worked and ate.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas and measures 54 x 81 cm; it is held by the São Paulo Museum of Art under inventory number MASP.00152. The year 1918 is recorded to year precision, so we print it; where a record is precise only to a decade we print no year at all and say so. The measurements were read together with their unit. The proportions of our own file agree with the record to within 1.5 per cent, which confirms it.
What you receive
The painting is made for you by hand, oil on canvas, to order, in the size you choose, including custom sizes. Because the colour range is narrow, this motif sits unusually well with warm wood and green rooms; reproductions on canvas of this kind stay calm even at a large format. The work takes some weeks and every copy differs slightly; that is the consequence of a person painting it rather than a machine, not a defect. We send you a photograph of the finished canvas before it ships. Our 3D application lets you choose a frame and renders that frame realistically on screen; separately, our visualization service places the picture on your own wall before you buy. It is never a print.
| Year of creation: | 1918 |
| Original size (width × height): | 54 x 81 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), inv. MASP.00152 |
The neck in this portrait is longer than anatomy would bear, and that is exactly why the picture works. Modigliani is not drawing the person as she was but the bearing he saw — and that stays on a wall long after the sitter’s name has gone.
