Boy with hands crossed

Identification

Published titles

English: Boy with hands crossed / Boy with hands on lap / Young boy / Young man seated, hands crossed on his knees.
French: Jeune homme assis, les mains croisées sur les genoux (Sotheby’s, 2019).

Date

1918?

Medium

Oil on canvas.

Dimensions

92 × 60 cm.

Signature

Signed modigliani at top right.

Present location

Private collection. Last named public sale: Sotheby’s, London, 19 June 2019, lot 8, sold for £18,422,000 (premium).

Catalogue numbers

Legal note on MR: This investigation has not had access to MR’s catalogue raisonné; all research here is based on open sources, publications and exhibitions. By no means has that catalogue been copied at any point. Modigliani Project and Modigliani Initiative are marked YES when the work is published or otherwise recorded by those projects, even if no catalogue number is assigned; otherwise the field is marked ?.

Provenance

1. Léopold Zborowski, Paris (sold 1927).
2. Crespo Collection, Buenos Aires (1927?–2019).
3. Sotheby’s, London, Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale, 19 June 2019, lot 8, estimate GBP 16,000,000–24,000,000, sold GBP 18,422,000.
4. Private collection.

The sequence follows the published museum, sale, and catalogue record in this investigation. Gaps and uncertain transfers are marked as such.

Selected bibliography

Book-length publications are marked with a footnote giving a full citation. Exhibition catalogues appear in both this list and the exhibition list when this investigation recorded them in both places. Where this investigation listed a long run of secondary mentions, only the principal catalogues and museum or sale references are retained here.

• Ambrogio Ceroni and Leone Piccioni, 1970, no. 250, dated 1918, as Boy with hands in lap, Crespo Collection, Buenos Aires.¹
• Osvaldo Patani, 1991–94, no. 264, dated 1918, as Boy with hands in lap, private collection.²

Exhibitions

• No exhibitions were listed in this investigation.

Notes

This investigation marks the work as not located in the D’Atri papers.

This investigation records the canvas as unpublished in colour from the Ceroni black-and-white plate of 1970 until the 2019 Sotheby’s sale.

The 2019 sale catalogue cited Ceroni and Patani and did not cite Parisot, MR or Wayne.

This investigation records holes at the corners of the canvas. Two holes are visible; this investigation treats the others as probably covered by restoration.

This investigation records a drawn ear painted over the colour.

The original documentation assembled for this investigation marked several fields as still being checked. The facts above are those already published; where sources disagree, both readings are given.