Description
Amedeo Modigliani – Portrait of Moïse Kisling (1915), a hand-painted oil reproduction
Portrait of Moïse Kisling is a small, densely painted canvas of 1915 held by the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. Modigliani painted his friend and Montparnasse neighbour, the Polish painter Moïse Kisling, and lettered the sitter’s name straight into the top edge of the canvas. We make it as a hand-painted oil on canvas, to order; among our reproductions of famous paintings this is one of the most compact portraits on the shelf.
What is on the canvas
Head and shoulders, tightly cropped. Thick black hair is cut in a straight line across the forehead, the brows are strong and dark, the eyes almond-shaped with the sitter’s left a little wider than the right. The nose is long and straight, the mouth small and red with a dark cleft beneath it. The flesh is laid in salmon-pink over an olive underlayer that breaks through in places. A white collar and a dark bow show at the lower edge. The ground is a warm brown-maroon. Across the top of the canvas the letters KISLING are painted directly into the paint.
Who Kisling was
Moïse Kisling was a Polish painter who arrived in Paris in 1910 and settled in Montparnasse. He and Modigliani were close: they shared a studio and the circle of friends we now call the School of Paris. Kisling was one of the few who supported Modigliani through the years when he sold almost nothing. The portrait dates from 1915, the period in which Modigliani had returned for good to painting after his years as a sculptor and began the long run of portraits of the people around him.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas and measures 29 x 37 cm; it is held by the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan under inventory number 5037. The year 1915 is recorded to year precision, so we print it; where a record is precise only to a decade we print no year at all. The measurements were read together with their unit rather than as bare numbers. The proportions of our own file agree with the record to within 2.2 per cent, which confirms it.
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, which makes this motif especially rewarding at a larger scale: the head carries enlargement because it is built from a few firm planes. 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. These are reproductions on canvas and never prints.
| Year of creation: | 1915 |
| Original size (width × height): | 29 x 37 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (inv. 5037) |
The Kisling portrait is unusually direct among Modigliani works: no lengthened neck, no ornament, just a face looking straight out at you. On a wall it reads as a small, very calm piece that gains from being hung larger than the original.
