Description
Young Man with a Cap – hand-painted reproductions of famous paintings after Modigliani
Young Man with a Cap is a Modigliani of 1919, from the last year of his life. Among our reproductions of famous paintings it is one of the most direct on this shelf: a face, a cap, a scarf. The original is held by the Detroit Institute of Arts. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.
What is on the canvas
Head and shoulders seen from the front, tightly framed on a tall narrow canvas. ⭐ He wears a soft mustard-ochre flat cap with a peak — a working man’s cap, pulled down over reddish-brown hair — and it is the cap that gives the picture its name. The face is long and a pale cream-apricot; the eyes are narrow pale grey-blue slits with no pupils, the brows thin, the nose very long, the mouth small and pale pink, and prominent orange-pink ears stand out on both sides. The neck is long. He wears a dark navy jacket over a white shirt with a soft white knotted scarf at the throat. Behind him run strong vertical bands of ochre, orange-red and dark brown — a doorway and a wall. There is a faint signature at the upper right.
The cap is the whole portrait
Modigliani rarely gave people an object. Here is the exception: the cap. It is not decoration but the only thing that tells you anything about this young man — that he worked, rather than posed. Everything else the painter took away: no furniture behind, no hands, no badge of trade. What is left is a face with shut, empty eyes and a mustard shape above it. The white scarf at the throat is the second bright note, and together with the cap it holds the picture up. In colour this is one of the warmest things on the shelf, because every band behind him is ochre or red.
The record of the original — and what we could not read
The original is oil on canvas. ⚠️ We could not read the museum record: the Detroit Institute of Arts’ server refused us. We took the control immediately afterwards — the same route with an object reference that cannot exist returned the same refusal, so it is the server and not a missing record. The year 1919, the size 61 x 37.8 cm and the number 70.185 therefore come from the public Wikidata database, and we say where we read them. We assert nothing about ownership or about how the work reached the museum. We did check that our own file shows the whole painting rather than a framed picture on a wall. We give width first, so on our page it reads 37.8 x 61 cm. Of the sizes we offer, 40 x 65 cm follows the proportions of the original most closely — and it is very nearly the original’s own size — while 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. The subject is warm and plain, with no small detail to lose: a large face, a mustard cap, a white scarf. A painting like this works in a hallway, a kitchen or a living room, and it holds up at the small sizes too, because every shape in it is big. Since the original is itself small, 40 x 65 cm is both our closest size and a perfectly usable one for a wall. 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.
| Year of creation: | 1919 |
| Original size (width × height): | 37.8 x 61 cm |
| Painting style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Detroit Institute of Arts (inv. 70.185) |
The Boy and Boy in a Striped Sweater also stand on this shelf.
