Amedeo Modigliani – Young Woman (Oslo)

Young Woman (Oslo) – hand-painted reproductions on canvas after Modigliani

Young Woman is a Modigliani of 1918, held by the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo. Among our reproductions on canvas it is the barest on this shelf: a head, a neck and a dark garment, and nothing else. Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas.

What is on the canvas

Only the head and shoulders are painted, seen from the front and tightly framed. Dark chestnut hair is parted in the centre and drawn back over the ears, with a short spiky fringe falling over the forehead. The face is long and oval, a pale apricot; the eyes are dark grey-blue almonds with no pupils — flat fields of colour; the brows are thin and dark, the nose very long and drawn as an outline, the mouth small and a bright orange-red, and a pink ear shows at the right. The neck is very long. She wears a plain black high-necked garment that is no more than a dark mass along the bottom. The ground is a flat mottled grey-green with a touch of teal at the upper right. There is a faint signature at the upper left.

A title the museum itself gave up

⚠️ This painting was long called Portrait of Mme Zborowska, after Hanka Zborowska, the wife of the painter’s dealer Léopold. The museum that keeps it now rejects that, and we give its reason: individual likeness was not Modigliani’s way, so it seems likely that the sitter is unknown. We therefore use the title the museum uses — Young Woman — and not a name the museum does not accept. That is not a small thing: a portrait of Hanka Zborowska also stands on this shelf, and keeping the old title would have shown a customer two pictures of one woman that are nothing of the kind. The Oslo in our title says which collection holds it, because the title itself is a general one.

The record of the original

The original is oil on canvas. We read the museum record at source: it gives the title Young Woman, the year 1918, the technique oil on canvas, the size 54.7 x 37.7 x 1.8 cm and the number NG.M.02128, and records the acquisition as a gift from the Friends of the National Gallery in 1947. The museum also publishes the note on the sitter that we quote above. We assert nothing about ownership before 1947, because the museum does not publish it. We checked that our own file shows the whole painting. We give width first, so on our page it reads 37.7 x 54.7 cm. Of the sizes we offer, 110 x 160 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 the most concentrated on this shelf: a single face on a quiet grey-green wall, with no furniture, no hands and no story. It is that emptiness that lets it work in almost any room and stop it arguing with whatever is around it — a bedroom, a hallway, an office. Because every shape in it is large, it stays readable in the smaller formats too. 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 every fine art reproduction we make is hand-painted and never printed.

Madame Hanka Zborowska, after whom this painting was once named, also stands on this shelf, as does Woman with Earrings.

• Madame Hanka Zborowska
• Woman with Earrings