Girl in a Green Blouse1917
A young woman with golden-orange hair piled high sits facing us, her pale, almost white-irised eyes giving her a calm, unreadable look. More about this work
About this work
A young woman with golden-orange hair piled high sits facing us, her pale, almost white-irised eyes giving her a calm, unreadable look. Modigliani builds the figure from his familiar elements: an elongated oval face, a long neck, sloping shoulders and dark contour lines enclosing areas of mottled colour. The mint-green blouse stands out against warm honey and amber browns, and a russet door with a row of small windows fills the right half of the background. Painted in 1917, at the height of his short career in Paris, the portrait shows how he reduced a sitter to a few rhythmic curves while keeping a sense of individual presence.
Written by Ochre Editions.
What you’re looking at
Shown from the lap up, a pale-skinned woman with an oval face and long neck sits facing us in this vertical painting. The portrait is created with areas of mottled colors outlined with black lines. Her body faces us, and she looks out with pale blue eyes, the irises almost white. Her thin eyebrows slope down the sides and her small, dark peach lips are closed. Golden-orange hair is piled atop her head and a few bangs fall onto her high forehead. Black oval earrings hang from her lobes. Her shoulders also slope unnaturally down. Her mint-green shirt has a scooped neckline and elbow-length sleeves, and it appears to be tucked into a brown skirt or pants. The background is honey orange in the top left quadrant, amber brown in the lower left, and a russet brown door with windows across the top fills the right half. The artist signed the top right corner, “modigliani.”
Description from the National Gallery of Art.
How it was made
- Oil paint
- Pigment ground in a drying oil, usually linseed. It dries slowly, so painters could blend on the canvas, build up thin translucent glazes, and rework a picture over weeks. Canvas replaced wooden panels in the 1500s because it is lighter and can be rolled.
Amedeo Modigliani
Italian, 1884–1920
Modigliani trained in Italy before moving to Paris in 1906, where he lived the precarious life of Montmartre and Montparnasse. Influenced by Cézanne, by African and ancient sculpture, and by his own work as a sculptor with Brâncuși’s encouragement, he developed a distinctive manner of elongated faces, almond eyes and long necks. His portraits of friends and fellow artists, among them Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz, and his reclining nudes date mainly from his last five years. He died of tuberculous meningitis at thirty-five.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The National Gallery of Art has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1963.10.45
- Credit
- Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
- Type
- Painting
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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