Description
Viking Eggeling – a hand-painted reproduction of the Modigliani portrait
Viking Eggeling is a Modigliani portrait of 1916, and as a fine art reproduction it is one of the most unusually painted on this shelf: the face is not smoothed into a mask but built from short, visible strokes. The original is held by the LaM museum near Lille. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.
What is on the canvas
The sitter is shown to the chest, slightly turned, against a dark blue-green wall broken at the upper right by a brown rectangle. The hair is reddish-brown and recedes from a high forehead, with a pale parting line running up the centre. The face is long and angular and built from short crossing strokes of pink, ochre and pale green — the colour is laid on as Cézanne laid it, not as a smooth field. The eyes are blue-green almonds and, unlike most Modigliani portraits, they carry pupils; the gaze is an actual gaze. The nose is long and straight, the mouth full and orange-red, the left ear prominent. He wears a dark jacket over a pale striped shirt with a dark bow at the throat.
A chain of ownership the museum publishes by name
The LaM publishes not only the catalogue fields but the picture’s ownership history, and it is unusually clear. The canvas was in the collection of Roger Dutilleul, who bought it at the Galerie Percier in Paris on 22 May 1923. It passed by inheritance to Jean Masurel and stayed with him from 1956 to 1979, when Geneviève and Jean Masurel gave it to the museum. Because the chain of names runs unbroken from 1923 onward, it also covers the years 1933 to 1945 — inside Dutilleul’s Paris collection. The museum states no gap and we invent none. That is more than most institutions publish, so we report it as written.
The record of the original
The original is oil on canvas. The museum measures it 65 cm high and 46 cm wide; we give width first, so on our page it reads 46 x 65 cm, and the specification names the order in words as well. The figures come from the museum’s own page: the year 1916, the medium oil on canvas, the number 979.4.102, donated by Geneviève and Jean Masurel in 1979. The museum’s second record, in the Navigart database, renders only through JavaScript and served us no fields at all, so we state nothing from it. The proportions of our canvas follow the original.
What you receive
Our painter works the picture by hand, oil on canvas, at the size you choose. The subject is upright and restrained in colour — a dark blue-green ground and one warm mass of face — so it works well in a study, a library or an entrance hall, where a picture should hold order. Because the face is built from visible strokes, that handwriting only comes into its own at the larger sizes; at small ones it merges. 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: | 1916 |
| Original size (width × height): | 46 x 65 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | LaM – Lille Métropole, museum of modern, contemporary and outsider art, Villeneuve-d’Ascq (inv. 979.4.102), donated by Geneviève and Jean Masurel, 1979 |
This shelf also carries the portraits of Léon Indenbaum and Léon Bakst — men likewise painted at their trade, and likewise from Modigliani’s Paris years.
