Description
The Italian Woman – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani
The Italian Woman is a Modigliani portrait the museum places in 1918–19, and as a fine art reproduction it is one of the most orderly on this shelf: the sitter is upright in a dark dress with a white collar, against a warm orange wall. The original is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.
What is on the canvas
The sitter is shown to the hips, frontally, her hands folded low in her lap with the fingers showing. Dark brown hair is parted at the centre and gathered into two heavy masses beside the face. The face is long, oval and pale, with pink cheeks; the eyes are dark almonds and they carry pupils, the nose is long and straight, the mouth small and red. She wears a dark green-black high-necked dress over which falls a crisp white collar, with white cuffs at both wrists. The ground is a warm salmon-orange wall filling most of the panel; a pale grey-green vertical band runs down the right edge, and the orange-brown back of a chair shows at the lower left. The signature stands at the upper right.
What the museum says, and what it does not
The Metropolitan publishes its record through a public interface and it is brief: title, dating, medium, measurements, the number 56.4, and one line of acquisition — the Gift of The Chester Dale Collection, 1956. It publishes no ownership history before that, so we state none. It also does not mention a signature; it is on the photograph all the same, modigliani at the upper right, and we read it ourselves before opening the record. One detail worth reporting: for this work the museum marks its own photograph as public domain, while for Boy in a Striped Sweater on the same shelf it does not — the flag belongs to the individual record, not to the museum as a whole.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 102.6 cm high and 67 cm wide; we give width first, so on our page it reads 67 x 102.6 cm, and the specification names the order in words as well. The museum writes the year as “ca. 1918–19”, approximate, and we carry it the same way rather than reducing it to a single year. The proportions of our canvas follow the original — on this subject our range of sizes matches the original’s shape almost exactly, so the figure sits in our canvas as she sits in the one in New York.
What you receive
Our painter works the picture by hand, oil on canvas, at the size you choose. The subject carries one large colour contrast — a warm orange wall against an almost black dress — and for that reason it works best on a quiet, light wall where the orange competes with nothing. Because the sitter is frontal and looks straight out, the picture takes both closeness and a large format. 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, and 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: | 1918 |
| Original size (width × height): | 67 x 102.6 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 56.4), Gift of The Chester Dale Collection, 1956 |
Two more works from the same museum stand on this shelf — Boy in a Striped Sweater and Jeanne Hébuterne in a White Chemise — so the three New York canvases read together.
