Amedeo Modigliani – Paul Guillaume

Paul Guillaume – a hand-painted fine art reproduction after Modigliani

Paul Guillaume was the Paris dealer who, at twenty-three, backed Modigliani when almost nobody was buying him. As a fine art reproduction this 1915 portrait is one of the few on this shelf that carries its own name and its own date on its face. The original is held by the Toledo Museum of Art. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.

What is in the picture

The young man is shown to the chest and fills the upper two-thirds. Brown hair is combed back off a high, broad forehead; the face is long and a pale lilac-white; the eyes are dark almonds under finely arched brows; the nose is long and straight; the mouth is small and shows a glint of white teeth — a rarity in Modigliani. He wears a pale grey-green jacket over a white shirt with a wide soft collar and a long black tie that falls the whole length of the chest, with a small dark button on the lapel. Behind him, at the left, is a yellow-ochre panelled door or bookcase; at the right a dark brown-black field with a small dark object standing on a shelf.

A painting that signs and dates itself

PAUL GUILLAUME is lettered in capitals across the lower left. Low down at the right edge the word SETTEMBRE is stacked vertically with 1915 beneath it. At the lower right is the signature modigliani. That is unusual: the painter wrote the sitter’s name, the month and the year onto the picture itself. It means we know the month this was painted even when the museum sheet cannot be opened — we read it off the painting. Guillaume collected African art, and that taste is part of why Modigliani’s faces of these years look less like portraits than like carved masks.

The record of the original — and what is not agreed about it

⚠️ We could not read the museum record: the server refused us. That this says nothing about whether the record exists we checked with a control — the same route with an impossible number returned the same refusal, so it is the server. The year 1915, the size 74.9 x 52.1 cm and the number 1951.382 therefore come from Wikidata and from Google Arts & Culture, which names the Toledo Museum of Art as its source. We assert nothing about ownership. ⚠️ The support of the original is not agreed: it is certainly not canvas, the museum’s own publications have said cardboard since the 1960s, and other authorities say board or even wood. We give cardboard and we say that the sources differ. Our reproduction is oil on canvas. We give width first, so on our page it reads 52.1 x 74.9 cm. Of the sizes we offer, 80 x 115 cm follows the proportions of the original most closely; the others are standard formats and differ from it a little.

What you receive

Our painter works the picture by hand, oil on canvas, at the size you choose. The subject is light and calm: a pale green jacket, a white collar, and one strong black stroke of tie. That tie holds the whole composition together and is what makes the picture carry across a room. Because the face is large and softly painted, the subject also holds up at the middle sizes. A picture like this works in an office, a study or a hallway, where the look at it is short and frequent. 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, and our reproductions on canvas leave the atelier stretched and ready to hang.

Portrait of Léopold Zborowski, the dealer who followed Guillaume, stands on this shelf, as does The Red Head from the same year.

• Portrait of Léopold Zborowski
• The Red Head