Identification

Published titles

English: The Flower Vendor; The Florist; Seated Woman; Young Woman Seated.
French: La Marchande de fleurs; La Fleuriste. Italian: La Fioraia.

Date

Now generally dated 1919. Early literature (Salmon, Scheiwiller, Pfannstiel, the 1933 Brussels and 1950 Rosenberg exhibitions) dated the work 1917; Samuel Marx’s collection literature used 1915–16. Ceroni 1965 already gives 1919.

Medium

Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogues it as oil on canvas.

Dimensions

116.8 × 73.7 cm (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Figures of 45 × 37.5 cm and Parisot’s 46 × 38 cm, quoted elsewhere in this investigation, belong to another object or are catalogue errors. Pfannstiel listed the composition twice (nos. 122 and 221).

Signature

Signed modigliani at top right.

Present location

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. 1996.403.9. Bequest of Florene M. Schoenborn, 1995 (accessioned 1996 as 1996.403.9).

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. Ownership before Louis Libaude is not documented.
2. Louis Libaude Collection, Paris (until 1925).
3. Galerie Bing, Paris (1925–1927).
4. Constant Lepoutre, Paris.
5. Lecomte-Durey Collection, Paris (recorded 1929).
6. Mme Lederlin Collection, Paris.
7. Mme Lederlin sale, Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 22–23 March 1933, lot 136 (23,090 francs).
8. Jos Hessel, Paris (acquired at that sale).
9. Private collection, Zurich (possibly Schoenborn; unconfirmed).
10. Mme Marquiset, Paris.
11. Paul Rosenberg Gallery, New York (acquired from Mme Marquiset on 12 June 1950, stock no. 5391, 3,500,000 francs).
12. Samuel and Florene Marx Collection, Chicago (acquired 3 November 1950 for $18,000); held 1950–1964.
13. Florene May Marx, later Mrs Wolfgang Schoenborn, New York, 1964–1995.
14. Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 1996.403.9, Schoenborn bequest, 1995.

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.

• Waldemar George, “Modigliani,” L’Amour de l’art, Paris, October 1925, p. 383, as La Marchande de fleurs.
• Maurice de Vlaminck, “Modigliani,” L’Art vivant, Paris, November 1925.
• André Salmon, 1926, pl. 12, as La Fleuriste, dated 1917.¹
• Giovanni Scheiwiller, 1927, pl. 2, as La Fioraia, dated 1917.²
• Arthur Pfannstiel, 1929, p. 106; presumed list pp. 18 and 36, pl. 91, dated 1917.³
• “Les Ventes,” Le Bulletin de l’art ancien et moderne, no. 797 (May 1933), pp. 239–240.
• Sueo Taguchi, Tokyo, 1936, pl. 13.
• Arthur Pfannstiel, 1956, nos. 122 and 221, both as The Flower Vendor, dated 1917.⁴
• Ambrogio Ceroni, 1965 supplement, no. 218, as Jeune femme assise (La marchande de fleurs), dated 1919.⁵
• Joseph Lanthemann, 1970, no. 417.⁶
• Ambrogio Ceroni, Rizzoli 1970 and French 1972, no. 331.⁷
• Christian Parisot, 1991, no. 12/1919.⁸
• Osvaldo Patani, 1991–94, no. 343.⁹
• Sabine Rewald, Metropolitan Museum collection catalogues, 2007, nos. 132 and 193.¹⁰

Exhibitions

• Paris, Galerie Bing et Cie, Modigliani, 1925, no. 6.
• Dresden, Internationale Kunstausstellung, 1926, no. 196.
• Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1933, no. 44, dated 1917.
• Basel, Kunsthalle, 1934, no. 36.
• New York, Rosenberg Galleries, 1950, no. 8, dated 1917.
• Cleveland and New York, Modigliani–Soutine, 1951, dated 1917.
• Chicago, The Arts Club, 1959.
• New York, Chicago, Saint Louis, Mexico City and San Francisco, The School of Paris (Schoenborn / Marx collection), 1965–66.
• New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Schoenborn bequest display, 1997, no. 12; Painters in Paris, 2000.
• Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, 2001.
• Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, 2007, no. 132; Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, 2007.
• Japanese retrospective, 2008, no. 35 (Nagoya; other venues unconfirmed).
• Bonn, 2009, no. 116.

Notes

Listed as no. 44 in the D’Atri papers, with the date corrected from 1917 to 1919–20, size 116 × 73 cm, and a consistent provenance and exhibition list.

A detail photograph in this investigation shows the drawing of the ears lying over the painted colour.

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