Amedeo Modigliani – Portrait of a Young Woman (Yale)

Portrait of a Young Woman (Yale) – a hand-painted fine art reproduction after Modigliani

Portrait of a Young Woman is a Modigliani of 1918 and one of the smallest canvases he painted. As a fine art reproduction it is among the most concentrated on this shelf. The original is held by the Yale University Art Gallery. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.

What is on the canvas

Head and shoulders in strict profile facing left, on a tall narrow canvas. Long auburn-copper hair falls loose down the back and over the shoulder, filling almost the whole right half. The face is a pale cream with a rosy cheek; ⭐ a single dark brown eye is visible, and it has a pupil and an iris — a rarity in Modigliani, whose eyes on this shelf are most often blank fields. The brow is fine and dark, the nose long and straight, the mouth small and orange-red, the neck long. She wears a dark navy garment. The ground is a flat ochre-tan at the left, darker at the right. The signature modigliani stands at the upper right.

A small canvas, held very close

The original measures only 27.9 by 45.7 centimetres — the smallest Modigliani on this shelf. That is exactly why the face sits so close: the painter had no room for a body, a chair, a room. What is left is a profile and hair. The eye with a pupil is the second peculiarity. When Modigliani left eyes blank he was saying that you do not draw a person by looking into them; here he did the opposite, and the portrait feels more personal than most of his because of it.

The record of the original

The original is oil on canvas. We read the museum record at source: it gives the title Portrait of a Young Woman, the year 1918, the technique oil on canvas, the size 45.7 x 27.9 cm and the number 1948.123, and records the acquisition as the bequest of Kate L. Brewster. The museum also states that the work is on view, and that it is signed at the upper right — which we can see on our own file. ⚠️ The museum gives the width as 27.9 cm where our list had 28.0; the museum’s figure stands. ⚠️ The museum publishes the ownership history and hedges it itself: from the painter’s studio in Nice, possibly to Léopold Zborowski about 1919, probably to Mary Quinn Sullivan in New York by 1935, then sold to Kate L. Brewster of Chicago in December 1935 and bequeathed to the museum in 1947. The words possibly and probably are the museum’s and we do not remove them. We give width first, so on our page it reads 27.9 x 45.7 cm. Of the sizes we offer, 106 x 173 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 simple and warm: a profile, hair, an ochre ground. Because the original is small and densely painted, it carries at every size we make — the face stays clear even in the smaller formats, and the brushwork in the hair opens up in the larger ones. A painting like this works in a bedroom, a study, or on a narrow wall beside a door. 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.

Jeanne Hébuterne in a Yellow Sweater and Head of a Woman also stand on this shelf.

• Jeanne Hébuterne in a Yellow Sweater
• Head of a Woman