''The Little Peasant'' is a 1918

oil painting Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of ...

of a youth by

Amedeo Modigliani Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (, ; 12 July 1884 – 24 January 1920) was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by a surreal elongation of faces, necks, and ...

. It is held in the

Tate Gallery Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...

, in

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

. The painting has a faint

chromatism In optics, chromatic aberration (CA), also called chromatic distortion and spherochromatism, is a failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same point. It is caused by dispersion: the refractive index of the lens elements varies with the wave ...

, a delicate color variation and harmony. It was painted in

Nice Nice ( , ; Niçard: , classical norm, or , nonstandard, ; it, Nizza ; lij, Nissa; grc, Νίκαια; la, Nicaea) is the prefecture of the Alpes-Maritimes department in France. The Nice agglomeration extends far beyond the administrative c ...

, based on a room where Modigliani also painted

Jeanne Hébuterne Jeanne Hébuterne (; 6 April 1898 – 26 January 1920) was a French painter and art model best known as the frequent subject and common-law wife of the artist Amedeo Modigliani. She took her own life the day after Modigliani died, and is now bu ...

History and description

Modigliani went to the south of

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

in April or May 1918 and seems to have stayed there at least until July of the same year. He lived in

Cagnes-sur-Mer Cagnes-sur-Mer (, literally ''Cagnes on Sea''; oc, Canha de Mar) is a French Riviera town in the Alpes-Maritimes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France. Geography Cagnes-sur-Mer is a town in south-eastern ...

, and from there in

. He returned to Paris on 31 May 1919. Joseph Lanthemann, in 1976, suggested that ''The Young Peasant'' was created in Nice, based on the fact that it shows the same room as other works by Modigliani depicting

, who are believed to have painted there. It seems to have been created, in any case, during his stay in the south of France, and can be considered a testimony of the Cézanne inspired period that the artist was going through. Although Lanthemann dates the painting to 1919, it misses the extreme stylization and elongation that characterizes Modigliani's later work and therefore seems more likely to have been painted in 1918.Joseph Lanthemann, ''Modigliani 1884-1920: Catalogue Raisonné'', Barcelona, Nº 373, p. 133, 1970 (Catalan) The artist inscribed the title of the work on the lower right of the canvas, identifying the man seated on the chair as the 'peasant boy'. However, the same model appears in another painting, ''The Young Apprentice''. Modigliani had been very influenced by

post-impressionist Post-Impressionism (also spelled Postimpressionism) was a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction ag ...

Paul Cézanne Paul Cézanne ( , , ; ; 19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionism, Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavour to a ...

, and it seems likely that the current painting was inspired by a Cézanne's series of paintings depicting workers in the fields, predominantly in blue tones. In the portrait, the faint chromaticism of the face of the sitter, despite its delicacy in the tonal variations, manages to prevail and then be suppressed by the force of the background, an effect deliberately studied for the creation of harmony.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Little Peasant, The 1918 paintings Paintings by Amedeo Modigliani Paintings of children Collection of the Tate galleries