Amedeo Modigliani – Reverie (Study for the Portrait of Frank Burty Haviland)

Reverie (Study for the Portrait of Frank Burty Haviland) – hand-painted after Modigliani

Reverie is Modigliani’s 1914 study for a portrait of the painter and collector Frank Burty Haviland. Among our reproductions on canvas it is unlike most on this shelf: unfinished, broken down into strokes. The original is held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.

What is on the canvas

The figure is seated in profile facing left, built from short separated dabs of ochre, teal, red, pink and cream. The head is at the upper left, pale, flecked with orange, under a patterned cap in olive and red. The neck is long; the body slopes down to the right in mottled ochre and dark green, and a red and black patterned band runs down the centre. The right side of the picture dissolves into red and pink dabs. Blue-grey vertical bands frame it at the left and right. The warm support shows through the paint everywhere – and that is exactly what makes the work what it is.

A study that stayed a study

The word study in the title is not a courtesy. The work really is unfinished: the support is visible, the strokes stand apart from one another, the face is indicated rather than worked up. That is what makes this subject interesting – in most Modigliani portraits we see a finished surface, while here we see the painter thinking before he decided. The colours are set side by side rather than blended, which is closer to what his neighbours in Paris were doing at the time than to his own later, smoother portraits.

The record of the original

We read the museum sheet at source. ⚠️ The original is not oil on canvas: the museum records it as oil and graphite on cardboard – two techniques on a paper support, not on canvas. You can see it in the picture, where the warm support pushes through the paint. Our reproduction is oil on canvas, and we say so rather than let anyone expect cardboard. The museum gives the year 1914, the size 62.23 x 49.53 cm and the number 27.7.2a – with a letter at the end that our own list did not carry, and the museum’s is the one that stands. The work was sold from the painter’s studio to Frank Burty Haviland as early as 1914, passed through a Paris auction in 1926, and reached Los Angeles in 1927, where it has been ever since. We give width first, so on our page it reads 49.5 x 62.2 cm. Of the sizes we offer, 40 x 50 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. This subject lives on its brushwork, so we paint it with the stroke left visible rather than smoothing it out – a smooth version would take away the very thing that makes it worth having. The palette is warm and broken, ochre, teal and red, which sits well against wood and pale walls. Because it is a study, we recommend a larger format, where the individual strokes separate. 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. Every fine art reproduction we make is hand-painted and never printed.

The Red Head and Lola de Valence, from the same years, also stand on this shelf – neither of them painted on canvas either.

• The Red Head
• Lola de Valence