Description
Portrait of Lunia Czechowska in a White Blouse – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani
Portrait of Lunia Czechowska in a White Blouse is a Modigliani of 1917, and as a fine art reproduction it is one of the quietest paintings we make: the sitter is turned almost into profile, in a white blouse, against a ground divided into three vertical bands. The original is held by the Pola Museum of Art in Japan. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke.
What is on the canvas
The sitter is shown to the hips and turned almost into profile to the left. Chestnut hair is parted at the centre and gathered low into a knot; the face is long and oval, built like a mask; the eyes are pale blue-grey almonds with no iris at all, so they look out without looking at anything. The nose is long and straight, the mouth small and reddish, and the neck is unusually long — the most recognisable thing Modigliani does to a sitter. She wears a white blouse with a soft collar and a small oval brooch at the throat; a dark skirt begins below it. The ground is not a room but three vertical bands: dark red-brown at the left edge, blue-grey behind the head, red-brown again at the right. The signature stands at the upper right.
The picture everyone catalogues by its blouse
This work is known across catalogues by the white blouse — in German as the portrait of Lunia Czechowska with a white blouse, in Italian with a white shirt, in French with a white chemisier. The reason is visible at once: the blouse is the largest and lightest shape on the canvas and the only thing that catches the light. Everything else is held down — the muted red-brown ground, the dark skirt, the chestnut hair. Modigliani has built the whole composition around one bright field and around the long vertical of the neck that carries it. The museum lists the work inside its own named group of Modiglianis, so it does not stand alone there; it publishes no ownership history for the picture, and where the museum says nothing, neither do we.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 72.8 cm high and 45 cm wide; we give width first, so on our page it reads 45 x 72.8 cm, and the specification names the order in words as well. The figures were read from the museum’s own pages, Japanese and English: the year 1917, the medium oil on canvas, the size 72.8 x 45.0 cm. We corrected one number we had previously carried wrongly: the height is not 70 cm but 72.8 cm, as the museum gives it — and the proportions of the photograph of the work agree with the museum better than with our earlier figure. The museum does not print an accession number on the page; 002-0058 is carried in its own web address. Of the sizes we offer, 90 x 140 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, including a size made to measure. The subject is upright and quiet, with no story in it, so it hangs well where a painting should settle a wall rather than command it — a bedroom, a hallway, a stairwell, or between two windows. Because the white blouse is the light of the picture, the subject reads best on a darker or coloured wall, where that bright field separates. 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. Our reproductions on canvas leave the atelier stretched and ready to hang. Every painting we make is hand-painted and never printed.
| Year of creation: | 1917 |
| Original size (width × height): | 45 x 72.8 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Pola Museum of Art, Hakone (inv. 002-0058) |
Modigliani painted this sitter more than once: the shelf also carries her portrait of 1919, smaller at 46 x 33 cm and privately owned — a different canvas, not another version of this one. This shelf also carries the portraits of Modigliani’s dealer Léopold Zborowski and of his wife Hanka — three quiet faces from the same years that read better together than any one of them does alone.
