Café Singer

Amedeo Modigliani

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the knees up, a woman wearing a black dress is painted with areas of mottled color in this vertical painting. The woman’s body faces us, her shoulders sloping steeply down from her elongated neck. She sits with her hands in her lap, and she looks down and to our left. Her peach-colored, long, narrow face comes to a point at her chin, and her cheeks are flushed pink. Her almond-shaped eyes, curved brows, long nose, and closed lips are outlined with gray. Her brown hair is pulled up and back, and short bangs brush her forehead. A gold-colored disk at the point of the dress’s V-neck could be a brooch. Two parallel black lines suggest a chair rail running behind the woman’s elbows. The background is painted with visible strokes of fog gray and moss green above the rail and darker, elephant gray below. The artist signed the upper right corner, “modigliani.”