Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz

Ten francs a sitting

Jacques Lipchitz told the story himself in his 1954 book on Amedeo Modigliani. In 1916 he had just signed a contract with the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, so he had a little money. He was also newly married, and he and his wife decided to ask Amedeo Modigliani to paint them.

Amedeo Modigliani answered: my price is ten francs a sitting and a little alcohol, you know. The Art Institute of Chicago says Jacques Lipchitz commissioned the portrait to help his friend, who was short of money, on the occasion of his marriage to Berthe Kitrosser.

The next day Amedeo Modigliani came and made a lot of drawings, one after the other, very fast and very precise. Two of them, one of each sitter, are reproduced in Jacques Lipchitz's book. In the end they chose a pose based on the couple's wedding photograph.

Finished in a day, stretched to two weeks

The following day, at one o'clock, Amedeo Modigliani arrived with an old canvas and his box of paints. Jacques Lipchitz remembered him sitting in front of the canvas, which he had propped on a chair, working quietly and stopping now and then to take a gulp from the bottle of alcohol beside him.

By the end of the day Amedeo Modigliani said, well, I guess it's finished. Jacques Lipchitz felt uneasy at getting the painting for only ten francs. Jacques Lipchitz had not imagined that two portraits on one canvas could be done in a single session.

So Jacques Lipchitz invented excuses for more sittings. You know, he told his friend, we sculptors like more substance. Amedeo Modigliani answered: well, if you want me to spoil it, I can continue.

As Jacques Lipchitz recalled it, the portrait then took almost two weeks, probably the longest Amedeo Modigliani ever spent on one painting. The Art Institute of Chicago tells the same story: two days to paint, and two more weeks so that Jacques Lipchitz could pay him a larger fee.

The sculptor and the poet

Jacques Lipchitz was a sculptor. He wrote that Max Jacob first introduced him to Amedeo Modigliani, who invited him to his studio at the Cité Falguière, a cluster of artists' studios in the fifteenth arrondissement. Amedeo Modigliani was still carving stone then. Jacques Lipchitz found him outdoors in the courtyard, arranging a few stone heads, maybe five, on the cement floor. Amedeo Modigliani explained that he had thought of them all as one group. Jacques Lipchitz thought the heads were shown at the Salon d'Automne later that year. Tate Modern says a group of seven of Amedeo Modigliani's stone heads was in the Salon d'Automne of 1912.

The Art Institute of Chicago names his wife as Berthe Kitrosser, a Russian poet. The painting shows the difference between the two of them plainly: his pale open eyes and her dark lowered ones, his standing figure and her small seated one.

The death mask

When Amedeo Modigliani died in January 1920, the painter Moïse Kisling and a friend, Conrad Moricand, tried to make a plaster cast of his face. Jacques Lipchitz wrote that they did it very badly and brought him a lot of broken pieces of plaster.

Jacques Lipchitz patiently put the pieces together and rebuilt the missing parts as well as he could. He made twelve plaster copies of the mask, which went to Amedeo Modigliani's family and friends.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington owns a bronze cast of the mask, made in 1929, and credits it to Jacques Lipchitz, assisted by Conrad Moricand and Moïse Kisling.

Traded for stone sculptures

The portrait hung on Jacques Lipchitz's wall for a long time. Then, after Amedeo Modigliani's death, he wanted his dealer to give back some of his stone sculptures that he no longer felt represented his work. The dealer asked more money than he could pay. The only thing Jacques Lipchitz could offer in exchange was the Modigliani portrait.

The dealer accepted, and as soon as Jacques Lipchitz had his stones back, he destroyed them. The Art Institute of Chicago records the exchange: the painting went to Léonce Rosenberg, of the Galerie de l'Effort Moderne in Paris, in about 1921.

The earliest exhibition the Art Institute of Chicago lists is in December 1920, a retrospective of Amedeo Modigliani's work at the Galerie Montaigne in Paris, as Portrait du sculpteur L. et de sa femme, meaning portrait of the sculptor L. and his wife.

Léonce Rosenberg sold it in 1922 to Frederick C. Bartlett and Helen Birch Bartlett of Chicago. After Helen Birch Bartlett died, the painting was given to the Art Institute of Chicago, on 27 January 1926. For years the museum called it simply Double Portrait.

1916 or 1917?

The Art Institute of Chicago dates the painting 1916, and Jacques Lipchitz himself put the commission in 1916. Many books have given 1917 instead, including Christian Parisot's and Osvaldo Patani's catalogues of 1991, according to the museum's list of publications.

The painting has travelled widely. The portrait was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1942 and 1951, at the Tate Gallery in London in 1952, at Tate Modern in 2017 and at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in 2023. In September 2026 the Art Institute of Chicago listed it on view in Gallery 391.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Jacques Lipchitz said Amedeo Modigliani finished this double portrait in one day, and that he paid him to keep working on it for almost two weeks. Up close you can see the name painted across the wall, two very different pairs of eyes, a hand beside a collar and a few shapes behind the couple that are hard to name.