Secret Modigliani

Jean-Baptiste Alexandre au Crucifix

Oil on canvas — 1909

Date1909
MediumOil on canvas
Size92 × 75 cm
CollectionMusée de Beaux-Arts Rouen
Signature"modigliani / 1909" upper left
Investigation44

jean alexandre with a crucifix -amedeo modigliani

Identification

Title
English: Jean-Baptiste Alexandre with a crucifix- Portrait Jean-Baptiste Alexandre.
French: Jean-Baptiste Alexandre au crucifix - Portrait de Jean-Baptiste Alexandre.
Italian: Ritratto col crocifisso.
Date
1909
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
92 × 75 cm
Notes: 92 × 75 cm (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, Joconde/POP; Secret Modigliani); 92 × 73 cm (Tate Papers technical study, which identifies a standard no. 30 figure canvas; also Ceroni, Parisot and Patani) R: 92 × 73 cm.
Signature
Signed and dated "modigliani / 1909" upper left
Notes: stretcher label "3390 / Exposition posthume"; supplier's stamp "Hardy-Alan, 36 rue du Cherche-Midi" on the reverse of the canvas (Tate Papers).
Present location
Musée de Beaux-Arts Rouen, inv. 1988.11.1.

Catalogue numbers

Compiler Number
Arthur Pfannstielno. 12
Joseph Lanthemannno. 26
Ambrogio Ceronino. 12
Jeanne ModiglianiYES
Christian Parisot11 /1909
Osvaldo Patanino. 16
Modigliani ProjectYES
MRYES
Modigliani Initiative/ AMDC ?

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 Research Project 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. Blaise Alexandre Collection, Paris.
  2. Commune Rouen, 1988.

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.

Exhibitions

Notes

Museum record (verified): Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, inv. 1988.11.1. Oil on canvas, 92 × 75 cm. Signed and dated upper left “Modigliani/1909”. Gift of Blaise Alexandre, 1988. Title: Jean-Baptiste Alexandre au crucifix / Portrait de Jean-Baptiste Alexandre.

no. 254 in D' Atri files, Alexandre provenance.
Where sources disagree, both readings are given. This is a working research page, not a catalogue raisonné.

signature
Signature
alexandre with crucifix visible at tate galelry exhibit in 2017
Alexandre with crucifix visible at Tate gallery exhibit in 2017
Jean Alexandre, next to his father jean baptiste in LAM Villeneuve d asq
Jean Alexandre, next to his father Jean Baptiste in LAM Villeneuve d'Asq

Introduction

An elderly man in a black suit sits squarely before us, his hands joined on his lap, his white beard and yellowish moustache framing a face built of orange, pink and green. To the left falls a heavy red curtain; behind him a grey-blue wall carries, at the upper right, the dark shape of a cross. This is the portrait of Jean-Baptiste Alexandre, father of Modigliani's first patron, Dr Paul Alexandre, and of his younger brother Jean. Tate Papers calls it "his first official commission", and Paul Alexandre, as quoted by the LaM in 2016 from Noël Alexandre's Modigliani inconnu, recalled: "Je lui ai fait faire le portrait de mon père, de mon frère Jean et plusieurs portraits de moi."
The painting is exceptional among the early works for two reasons. It is one of the few early Modigliani paintings to be signed and dated, and it is one of the five paintings examined in depth by the Tate Papers study (no. 35) of works with paintings beneath the visible surface. This essay therefore rests, unusually, on direct technical evidence. It examines composition, line, colour and facture, the figure and its space, the iconography of the crucifix, comparisons, the provenance and exhibition history with their discrepancies, and the findings of the technical study.

Composition and format

The canvas is upright. Tate Papers measures it at 92 × 73 cm, a standard no. 30 figure canvas, and notes that its edges are unpainted, which suggests the dimensions are original. Rouen and the Joconde/POP documentation give 92 × 75 cm; none of the sources I consulted explains the two-centimetre difference.
The sitter occupies the central axis. His head is placed in the upper third, slightly left of centre, and his body forms a broad, dark pyramid whose base is the lower edge of the canvas. The hands, joined just above the lower edge, close the composition and stop the eye from leaving the picture. Three vertical zones divide the background: at the left, a band of red curtain or upholstery about one-sixth of the width; then a narrow strip of pale ochre, perhaps a door frame or the edge of the curtain; then a grey wall that becomes greener round the head and bluer to the right of the shoulders. A brown-red chair back emerges behind the sitter's left shoulder and marks the depth between figure and wall.
The cross at the upper right is cut by the top edge of the canvas. It balances the signature and date at the upper left, so that the two upper corners carry, respectively, the artist's name and the sitter's faith. The arrangement is formal and symmetrical, appropriate to a commissioned portrait of a paterfamilias.

Line and contour

Line is less independent here than in the nudes of 1908. The contours of the suit are absorbed into the dark ground of the jacket and the shadows of the chair; only the white collar, the cuffs and the hands are sharply drawn. In the face, by contrast, drawing is everywhere. The nose is a long, straight wedge; the eyebrows are two strong arcs; the eyes are drawn as almond shapes with dark lids; the upper edge of the moustache is a firm curve. A dark line runs down the left cheek, separating the lit and shaded planes of the face. The ears are drawn as simple ovals.
The hands are described with a few curved strokes over a flat orange-pink tone, with dark iron-based accents (identified by Tate Papers) on their outlines. The handling is economical and almost schematic, in contrast with the more finished head.

Colour

At first sight the palette is dominated by black, grey and dull red. Tate Papers states that it is "more varied than it may initially appear", and close looking confirms this. The face is built from vermilion pinks and oranges, with green and blue-grey in the eye sockets and along the temples. The beard is white streaked with grey; the moustache is a yellow ochre. The red tie with blue accents is the brightest note of the costume.
The background is a carefully balanced triad. The red zone at the left is hot and saturated; the green zone round the head acts as its complementary; and the blue zone at the right cools the composition. The cross, in a reddish-brown, links the red of the curtain to the upper right of the picture. The black jacket, which Tate Papers shows to be a mixture of bone black, Prussian blue, cobalt blue, a chromium green and small amounts of red lake and vermilion, reads as a deep, slightly warm darkness rather than as flat black.

Facture

The surface is uneven. The wall is painted in broad, dragged strokes that leave the canvas texture visible, and the grey layer is thin enough to let a brown-red underlayer show through in places. The curtain is more thickly worked, with flecks of vermilion over darker red. The face is the most built-up area, but even there the strokes remain visible as separate planes of colour.
Tate Papers notes that the roughness of the jacket's surface corresponds to thick impasto layers beneath, belonging to an earlier composition (see below). Part of the visible texture of the painting is therefore not the texture of the portrait at all but that of a buried picture. The signature, in thick dark blue, skips over the dry surface, with gaps in the letters; the date was painted in the same colour but more fluid.

Figure and space

The sitter is seated, frontal and still. His shoulders are almost level, his gaze is directed straight at the viewer, and his hands rest in a gesture of composure. Space is shallow: the curtain and wall are close behind him, and only the chair back and the slight overlap of the shoulder against the wall suggest depth. The figure fills almost the whole width of the canvas at the bottom, which gives it weight and presence.
The pose belongs to the tradition of the official portrait of a bourgeois father, but the handling of the face, with its schematic features and constructed planes, belongs to the avant-garde. The LaM dossier explains the "facture classique de ces premiers portraits" by the fact that Paul Alexandre, who had little money, had to convince his family to accept them; the commission imposed a degree of conventional likeness and dignity.

Iconography

The crucifix gives the painting its usual title. Ceroni's first catalogue, according to the online transcription of his notes, titled it Ritratto col crocifisso "per la croce che appare in alto a destra". The cross is an attribute of the sitter: it identifies Jean-Baptiste Alexandre as a Catholic head of household, and it places the portrait within a domestic interior, presumably in the family home rather than in the studio. Its position, half cut by the edge of the canvas, keeps it from dominating the composition; it is a sign of the sitter's world rather than a devotional image.
The other attributes are those of status: the black suit, the white collar and cuffs, the red tie, the upholstered chair and the heavy curtain. The painting offers no allusion to the sitter's profession and no narrative. What it conveys is dignity and age, and perhaps a certain severity in the fixed gaze.

Comparisons

The closest comparisons are within the Alexandre group of 1909. Christie's 2015 essay on the portrait of Jean Alexandre (Ceroni no. 16) states that during 1909 Modigliani painted three portraits of Paul (nos. 13–15), the father (no. 12) and Jean (no. 16). The Ceroni notes, as transcribed online, give the sequence: the father first, then a study and two portraits of Paul, then Jean. The father's portrait shares with those of Paul the red curtain at the left edge and the dark costume against a coloured wall, but it differs in being seated, frontal and signed.
The constructed face, with its distinct planes of orange and green, has often been related to Cézanne. The Tate Modern large-print guide of 2017 notes, apropos The Beggar of Livorno (1909), that the Cézanne exhibition Modigliani had seen in 1907 "left a lasting impression". This is offered here as a comparison of method, not as a documented source for this painting.
A later comparison is Paul Alexandre in Front of a Window (1913, Rouen, inv. 1988.11.2), which entered the museum with this painting. There the head is elongated and the features simplified into the forms of the sculpted heads. The 1909 portrait of the father shows Modigliani before that transformation, still working within the conventions of the commissioned likeness.

Provenance, exhibitions and discrepancies

The work remained with the Alexandre family until 1988. Tate Papers states that it "was part of Paul Alexandre's collection and entered the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen in 1988 as part of the Blaise and Philippe Alexandre bequest". The Joconde/POP documentation describes the acquisition as a "don manuel" from the collection of Blaise Alexandre. The Tate large-print guide says "Donation Blaise and Philippe Alexandre, 1988". The Secret Modigliani page on the work says "Gift of Blaise Alexandre, 1988". The donor(s) and the legal form (gift or bequest) therefore vary across the sources. Tate Papers also states that the price of the commission was 500 francs.
The earliest exhibition is the Paris Trente ans d'art indépendant of 1926, no. 3097, cited by both Joconde/POP and the Secret Modigliani page. The stretcher label "3390 / Exposition posthume" reported by Joconde/POP does not correspond to that number. It may relate to another posthumous exhibition, but I have not identified it.
Joconde/POP lists Venice, Palazzo Grassi, 1993–94.

Technical analysis

This is one of the few early Modigliani paintings with a full published technical study: Tate Papers no. 35, carried out with the C2RMF. The study used X-radiography, MA-XRF, SWIR reflectance hyperspectral imaging, UV and specular light photography and cross-sections. The following points are direct evidence for this painting.
Support and ground. The canvas is relatively coarse and tightly woven (22.5 × 17.5 threads per cm) on a five-member stretcher with keys. A stamp of the supplier Hardy-Alan, 36 rue du Cherche-Midi, is on the reverse. Tate Papers notes that the firm moved to 92 Boulevard Raspail on 15 July 1907, so the canvas was probably bought before that date, though stamped canvases may have been sold later. A thick lead white ground, which does not reach the lower edge, suggests that the canvas was primed by hand, perhaps by Modigliani himself.
Palette. Modigliani used both lead white (for the flat shape of the face) and zinc white (for the brighter, more textured features). Skin tones are mainly vermilion, with an iron-based pigment for outlines. The red background is red lake on a tin-based substrate with vermilion; cobalt blue and a chromium green were laid over red layers; a cobalt blue layer along the right of the head may cover a pentimento. The cross contains cobalt blue, bone black, iron-based pigments and vermilion; the chair vermilion, earth and a chrome pigment.
Varnish. A thin, slightly yellowed varnish is uneven; the hands appear partly unvarnished.
Underlying images. The X-radiograph shows an underlying figure, possibly a seated (perhaps pregnant) nude woman or a heavy older man. Tate Papers suggests it may relate to Young Gypsy (C28). MA-XRF and SWIR show a second hidden image, upside down near the sitter's hands: the head of a bearded man, carefully painted, with an incomplete body. The authors propose the sequence nude, then (after a 180° rotation) bearded man, then (after a second rotation) the final portrait. They suggest the bearded man "could be an earlier version" of the portrait of Jean-Baptiste Alexandre but make no firm attribution. Cross-sections are inconclusive about intermediate grounds.
The study thus overturns any assumption that the commission was painted on a fresh canvas. As Tate Papers observes, it is "perhaps surprising" that Modigliani reused a previously painted canvas for his first official commission.

Conclusion

Jean-Baptiste Alexandre au crucifix is the most formal of the Alexandre portraits: frontal, seated, signed and dated, and furnished with the attributes of a respectable Catholic household. Its pictorial interest lies in the tension between this conventional framework and a modern handling of the face in coloured planes, and in a palette whose apparent sobriety conceals a sophisticated layering of reds, greens and blues. The Tate Papers study shows that the canvas carries two earlier images, one possibly a nude and one possibly a first attempt at the same sitter, and that the visible texture of the jacket partly belongs to those buried paintings. Discrepancies remain over the dimensions, the form of the 1988 donation, the stretcher label and the claim to be the first commission.

Museum documentation

  1. Ministère de la Culture, Plateforme ouverte du patrimoine (POP), Joconde, "Jean-Baptiste Alexandre au crucifix ; Portrait de Jean-Baptiste Alexandre", Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts, inv. 1988.11.1, https://pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/joconde/07290005830 (accessed 25 October 2026)
  2. Tate Modern, Modigliani (23 November 2017–2 April 2018), large-print guide, rooms 1–11 (copy at docslib), https://docslib.org/doc/1601730/modigliani-large-print-guide-room-1-11
  3. LaM, Villeneuve-d'Ascq, Amedeo Modigliani: l'œil intérieur, dossier pédagogique (2016), https://www.musee-lam.fr/sites/default/files/2019-01/Dossier-pedago-Modigliani-l-oeil-interieur.pdf

Sale literature

  1. Christie's, New York, 14 May 2015, sale 3736, lot 3, Modigliani, Jean Alexandre (recto) / Nu assis (verso): lot essay (for the 1909 sequence of Alexandre portraits), https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5893247

Technical literature (direct)

  1. Anaïs Genty-Vincent, Simonetta Fraquelli, Annette King, Allison Langley, Jennifer Mass, Kim Muir, Mina Porell, Marie-Amélie Senot and Anya Shutova, "Works by Modigliani that have Paintings beneath the Visible Surface", Tate Papers, no. 35, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/35/works-by-modigliani-that-have-paintings-beneath-the-visible-surface

Cited but not independently consulted

Trente ans d'art indépendant, Paris, 1926, no. 3097; Pfannstiel 1929, p. 2, and 1956, no. 12; Ceroni 1958, no. 10; Ceroni and Piccioni, I dipinti di Modigliani, 1970, no. 12; Lanthemann 1970, no. 26; Castieau-Barrielle 1987, p. 49; François Bergot, Le musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, 1989, pp. 103–104; Parisot 1991, 11/1909; Patani 1991, no. 16; Noël Alexandre, The Unknown Modigliani / Modigliani inconnu, 1993, p. 39 (and p. 59 for the quotation, as given by the LaM); Rouen, Guide des collections, 1994, pp. 152–153; Lugano 1999 catalogue, no. 3; L'Ange au visage grave, Paris, 2002, p. 23, pl. 15; Soto Caba 2007; Ireson and Fraquelli (eds.), Modigliani, Tate, 2017. All are cited from the Secret Modigliani page on the work.

Footnotes

  1. Arthur Pfannstiel, Modigliani. L’Art et la Vie, preface by Louis Latourette, Paris, Seheur, 1929 (presumed catalogue).
  2. Arthur Pfannstiel, Modigliani et son œuvre, étude critique et catalogue raisonné, Paris, Bibliothèque des Arts, 1956.
  3. Ambrogio Ceroni, Amedeo Modigliani: Peintre; suivi des souvenirs de Lunia Czechowska, Milan, Edizioni del Milione, 1958.
  4. Joseph Lanthemann, Modigliani, catalogue raisonné: sa vie, son œuvre, son art, Barcelona, G. Condal, 1970.
  5. Ambrogio Ceroni and Leone Piccioni, I dipinti di Modigliani, Milan, Rizzoli, 1970.
  6. Thérèse Castieau-Barrielle, La vie et l’œuvre de Amedeo Modigliani, Paris, ACR, 1987.
  7. Christian Parisot, Catalogue raisonné Modigliani, Livorno, Graphis Arte, 1991.
  8. Osvaldo Patani, Amedeo Modigliani: catalogo generale, Milan, Leonardo, 1991–94.
  9. MR (cited here as MR), Modigliani: l’ange au visage grave, Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, 2002. Cited from the published exhibition catalogue only.
  10. Victoria Soto Caba, Modigliani: The Timeless Face, Madrid, Libsa, 2007.
  11. Nancy Ireson and Simonetta Fraquelli, Modigliani, London, Tate Modern / Skira Rizzoli, 2017.