Amedeo Modigliani – Young Woman in a Yellow Dress

Young Woman in a Yellow Dress – a hand-painted fine art reproduction after Modigliani

Young Woman in a Yellow Dress is a Modigliani of 1918 and one of the few of his paintings that carries a pattern. As a fine art reproduction it is among the brightest on this shelf. The original is held by the Cerruti Collection at the Castello di Rivoli near Turin. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.

What is on the canvas

The young woman is seated, shown to below the hips, facing us with her head turned slightly to her left. Near-black hair is parted in the centre and drawn smoothly back over the ears, with one loose strand falling at the right. The face is a pale cream with a clear pink bloom on the cheek; the eyes are dark almonds carrying pupils and looking away to her left, the brows thin and arched, the nose long, the mouth small and dark red with a pronounced bow, the neck long. She wears a yellow-ochre dress with short sleeves, a wide scooped neck and a seam under the bust, scattered all over with small green, pink and blue-grey sprigs. Her right forearm lies across her lap, the hand relaxed. Behind her at the left is an ornate wall of black scrolling leaf forms in cream and olive; at the right a plain olive-brown column. The signature modigliani stands at the upper right, on the column.

The one pattern in Modigliani

Modigliani usually painted clothes as single flat fields — black, blue, brown. Here it is different: the yellow dress is strewn with small sprigs, and behind it an ornamental wall opens out in scrolling leaves. Two patterns in one picture, which is a rarity for him. That is why this subject reads more like a scene than a portrait; the eye travels from the sprigs on the dress to the leaves behind and back to the face. The yellow is also why this painting lights the wall it hangs on, which most Modigliani portraits do not.

The record of the original — and what we corrected

The original is oil on canvas. We read the record at the collection that holds it: it gives the year 1918, the size 92 x 60 cm, inventory number 0149 and catalogue number A142, and records the work as acquired in 1987. ⚠️ We corrected a mistake of our own: our list had named the Bernheim-Jeune gallery as the owner. Bernheim-Jeune did buy this canvas from Léopold Zborowski in June 1922, but sold it on in April 1923 — it is a step in the ownership history, not the present owner. The work has been in the Cerruti Collection since 1987. ⚠️ The collection publishes the whole chain: Zborowski, Bernheim-Jeune, Mme Guérin, the Jonas Netter collection in Paris from 1929, Mme Montreaux, the Galerie Bing from 1950, Robert von Hirsch, and sales in 1978 and 1986. The step from Mme Montreaux to the Galerie Bing is not dated in the record, so we assert nothing about the years between them. We give width first, so on our page it reads 60 x 92 cm. Of the sizes we offer, 130 x 200 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. The subject is warm and bright: the yellow dress takes nearly half the canvas, a cream face above it, ornament and column at the sides. A painting like this works in a living room, a dining room or a hallway, where colour should warm the space. We recommend the middle and larger formats, where the small sprigs on the dress and the leaves behind genuinely separate; at the smallest sizes they merge into a field. 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.

Girl with a Polka-Dot Blouse, the only other patterned subject here, stands on this shelf, as does The Italian Woman from the same last years.

• Girl with a Polka-Dot Blouse
• The Italian Woman