Description
Amedeo Modigliani – Madame Kisling (1917), a hand-painted fine art reproduction
Madame Kisling is a small portrait of 1917 held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, in the Chester Dale Collection. The sitter is Renée Kisling, wife of the painter Moïse Kisling, whose own portrait is on our shelf too. We make it as a hand-painted fine art reproduction, oil on canvas, to order; among our reproductions on canvas it is one of the most compact and the most decided in colour.
What is on the canvas
The portrait is bust length and tightly cropped. The hair is dark, cut in a bob with a heavy straight fringe that closes the face like a frame. The eyes are blue-grey almonds without pupils, the brows barely indicated, the nose long and straight. The mouth is a decided red – one of the few true accents on the canvas. She wears a dark jacket over a white shirt with a red tie, unusual in Modigliani’s portraits of women and giving the figure an urban, almost audacious note. The ground is dark maroon-black, broken by a lighter panel at the left. The signature is lower right.
The Kislings
Renée Kisling was the wife of Moïse Kisling, the Polish painter of Montparnasse and one of the few who supported Modigliani through the years when he sold nothing. Modigliani painted them both. The two portraits were made some years apart and were not conceived as a pair, but they are worth seeing together: his with the name lettered across the top edge, hers with that red tie. Both are on our shelf, and each shows a different side of the same circle of people.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas and measures 33 x 46 cm; it is held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Chester Dale Collection, under inventory number 1963.10.175. The year 1917 is recorded to year precision, so we print it. The measurements were read together with their unit. The institution was not named directly in our source, so it was resolved and then checked a second way: the adjacent inventory number from the same collection is already cited on our shelf for another work, and both point to the same gallery.
What you receive
The painting is made for you by hand, oil on canvas, to order, in the size you choose, including custom sizes. The original is small, so this motif gains at a larger format: enlarged, the red tie and the red mouth become the real carriers of the composition. 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: | 1917 |
| Original size (width × height): | 33 x 46 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | National Gallery of Art, Washington, Chester Dale Collection (inv. 1963.10.175) |
Among Modigliani’s portraits of women Madame Kisling is one of the least soft: the sharp bob, the red mouth, the tie. On a wall it works as a small hard accent rather than as decoration.
