Amedeo Modigliani – Portrait of Léopold Zborowski

Amedeo Modigliani – Portrait of Léopold Zborowski, a hand-painted oil on canvas

This canvas is held by the São Paulo Museum of Art, which dates it between 1916 and 1919 and catalogues it as Retrato de Leopold Zborowski. The sitter is the Polish poet who became an art dealer and, from 1916, Modigliani’s principal support. We make it as a hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, to order; among our reproductions of famous paintings it belongs beside the portrait of his wife, already on this shelf.

What is on the canvas

The man is seated and shown at three-quarter length, his hands folded in his lap. The chair beneath him is ochre-yellow and its curved back shows along the left edge. The hair is dark chestnut, the forehead high and receding, the parting central. He wears a full reddish-brown beard and moustache — uncommon among Modigliani’s male sitters. The eyes are pale blue and almond-shaped, the nose long, the mouth small. The suit is dark maroon, jacket and trousers of the same cloth, over a white shirt with a dark green-black necktie; white cuffs show at the wrists. At the left is an olive-ochre band of wall, at the right a large pale blue-green plane with a faint horizontal join. The signature is upper right.

The man who paid for the colours

Léopold Zborowski came to Paris as a poet and made his living placing pictures. From 1916 he paid Modigliani’s studio rent, bought his canvas and colours, found his models, and in December 1917 mounted the only solo exhibition the painter saw in his lifetime — an exhibition the police closed on its opening day. In the spring of 1918 he sent the painter and Jeanne Hébuterne south at his own expense, because the Paris winter was damaging him. The São Paulo museum holds six Modigliani canvases made between 1915 and 1919, and its own list of them names Renée and Madame G. van Muyden — both of which are on this shelf.

The record of the original

The original is oil on canvas and measures 65 x 100 cm; the museum gives 100 x 65 x 5.5 cm, height first, where we give width first. It is held by the São Paulo Museum of Art under inventory number MASP.00150, a gift of Euvaldo Lodi in 1950. We print no single year: the structured record carries only DECADE precision and, beyond that, no supporting source at all, while the museum publishes its own range of 1916–19. Because the institution record governs, that is what we print — including where it disagrees with the list we selected from. The proportions of our file agree with the record to within 0.3 per cent, the closest fit of the three works in this group.

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 maroon suit against the pale blue-green wall is a warm-cool opposition that works well in dining rooms and studies, and among our reproductions on canvas this is one of the calmest male portraits. 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.

Zborowski outlived Modigliani by twelve years and died without money. In this canvas he sits quite still, hands folded, like a man waiting — and the painter gave him that waiting without prettying it up.

• Madame Hanka Zborowska
• Renée