A woman with peachy skin and dark auburn hair is shown from her chest up sitting in a wooden chair in this vertical portrait painting. Her body is angled to our right, and her left arm, farther from us, rests on the back of the chair so the fingers of that hand rest alongside her left cheek. Her face is angled to our right but her dark eyes cut back to look at or toward us from the corners of her almond-shaped eyes. She has thin, gently arched brows, a long, sloping nose, and her burgundy-red lips are closed. Her features are outlined with delicate, dark gray or black lines. Bangs sweep across her forehead, and her hair looks like it might be pulled up and back. Her rust-brown garment has a square neckline, and a lighter strip of smoke gray and sky blue runs along her right shoulder, closer to us. She sits in front of an indistinctly patterned wine-red wall, with a lighter, tan-colored rectangle in the upper right corner. The background, her clothing, and the hand by her face are painted with areas of mottled color but the skin of her face seems smooth. The artist signed the painting with bright red letters at the upper right, “Modigliani.”
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A woman with peachy skin and dark auburn hair is shown from her chest up sitting in a wooden chair in this vertical portrait painting. Her body is angled to our right, and her left arm, farther from us, rests on the back of the chair so the fingers of that hand rest alongside her left cheek. Her face is angled to our right but her dark eyes cut back to look at or toward us from the corners of her almond-shaped eyes. She has thin, gently arched brows, a long, sloping nose, and her burgundy-red lips are closed. Her features are outlined with delicate, dark gray or black lines. Bangs sweep across her forehead, and her hair looks like it might be pulled up and back. Her rust-brown garment has a square neckline, and a lighter strip of smoke gray and sky blue runs along her right shoulder, closer to us. She sits in front of an indistinctly patterned wine-red wall, with a lighter, tan-colored rectangle in the upper right corner. The background, her clothing, and the hand by her face are painted with areas of mottled color but the skin of her face seems smooth. The artist signed the painting with bright red letters at the upper right, “Modigliani.”

National Gallery of Art · Painting

Adrienne (Woman with Bangs)

Amedeo Modigliani

Date
1917
Medium
oil on linen
Dimensions
overall: 55.3 x 38.1 cm (21 3/4 x 15 in.) framed: 71.4 x 54.6 x 6.3 cm (28 1/8 x 21 1/2 x 2 1/2 in.)
Classification
Painting
Accession number
1963.10.171
Credit line
Chester Dale Collection
Time span
1901 to 1925
Department
CMC

Subjects and terms

  • Italian
  • painted surface
  • female
  • portrait
Provenance

Possibly Paul Guillaume [d. 1934].[1] purchased 1927 by (Etienne Bignou, Paris);[2] sold 18 April 1928 to Chester Dale [1883-1962], New York; bequest 1963 to NGA. [1] A photograph of this painting is among those in an album of contre-types which belonged to Paul Guillaume. See letter dated 5 March 1998 from Pierre Georgel in NGA curatorial files. [2] According to Chester Dale papers in NGA curatorial files, the painting was "bought in 1927 by Mr. Bignou from an artist in Montparnasse, a friend of Modigliani." The Bignou photograph albums at the Documentation, Musée d'Orsay (copy, NGA curatorial files), contain no additional provenance information.

Inscription

upper right: Modigliani

NGA object ID 46646. Collection metadata is reproduced under CC0. This work is included because its NGA published-image record is marked open access; visitors should recheck the source record before substantial reuse.