Description
Amedeo Modigliani – The Boy (1919), a hand-painted oil on canvas reproduction
The Boy is a canvas of 1919 held by the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. Modigliani painted it during the winter he spent in the south of France, at Cagnes above the sea, where his dealer had sent him for his health; he wrote the name of the place on the canvas itself, under his signature. We make it as a hand-painted oil on canvas reproduction to order, and among our reproductions of famous paintings it is one of very few portraits of a child.
What is on the canvas
The boy is seated and shown at three-quarter length. He has propped his head in his own right hand, the elbow resting on the back of a red-brown chair that cuts diagonally across the lower right corner. His chestnut hair is cropped short and brushed off a high forehead. The face is a long oval, the eyes almond-shaped and open as dark slits, the nose long, the mouth small and red. He wears a grey-blue jacket with a wide collar, two large buttons and turned-back cuffs, over dark navy trousers. The ground is divided: ochre-brown wall at the left, a grey-blue plane at the right. The signature is upper right, with a place name beneath it.
The winter at Cagnes
In the spring of 1918 Modigliani was sent south with Jeanne Hébuterne by his dealer Léopold Zborowski, because the Paris winter was bad for a painter with lung disease and because the city was being shelled. They settled between Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer. There were no Paris models there, so he painted the people he actually met: children, servants, village boys, young farm labourers. These portraits are among his most direct — no ornament, no drawing-room pose — and that is exactly why they are among the best loved today. The Boy is one of them, and the signature is unusual: the painter rarely recorded where a work was made.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas and measures 60.3 x 92.1 cm. The museum publishes it in inches, 36 1/4 x 23 3/4, height before width; we print width first, as this shelf always does, so the two figures are the other way round while the measurement itself is the same. It is held by the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields under accession number 46.22, a gift of Mrs Julian Bobbs in memory of William Ray Adams, acquired in February 1946. The year 1919 is the museum’s own and so we print it. The museum also records the inscription: in bluish grey paint, upper right, Modigliani and Cagnes — which we had read on the file by eye before opening the record. The proportions of our file agree with the record to within 2.6 per cent.
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 motif is upright and quiet, and among our reproductions on canvas it is one of the easiest to place: it carries narrow walls, corridors and stairwell landings well, and the grey-blue and ochre sit easily with warm wood. 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.
| Year of creation: | 1919 |
| Original size (width × height): | 60.3 x 92.1 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indianapolis (inv. 46.22) |
The boy props up his head the way children do when they have been made to sit still too long. Modigliani did not tidy that posture into anything more painterly — and that is why the canvas reads as an encounter with a real person rather than as a portrait.
