Portrait (Dulcinea), 1911 Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Marcel Duchamp also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Portrait (Dulcinea) is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

The canvas offers a phalanx of elongated figures, five apparitions of the same imagined woman who seems to glide forward in incremental moments of undress. Each stance is angled marginally differently—torsos twist, shoulders cant, hats tilt—so that the eye reads a ripple of motion rather than discrete portraits. Limbs taper into narrow arabesques; breasts and hips are evoked by taut, faceted planes rather than anatomical curves. The background, a field of weightless ochres and muted greens, refuses to cede priority to the bodies: instead it seeps into them, eroding contours so that flesh and environment merge in a single vibrating atmosphere.

Duchamp’s palette is confined yet eloquent. Warm amber, terra‑cotta, and sulphuric yellows dominate, tempered by occasional slivers of cool sage and slate. The hues modulate gently, avoiding abrupt contrasts; chromatic transitions become the silent metronome that paces the viewer’s gaze from figure to figure. This restraint amplifies the painting’s temporal conceit: the subtle shift of tone across each body suggests a sequence of frames exposed fractionally later or earlier, like the ghosted images of Marey’s chronophotographic plates. Colour therefore becomes both skin and chronometer, registering the passage of imagined seconds.

Brushwork is brisk, planar, and analytical. Duchamp abandons the lyrical touch of Impressionism for a syntax of angled strokes, each facet tilting light in a different direction. Pigment is dragged rather than dabbed, leaving thin veils that permit the ground to breathe through. At intersections, strokes meet like the joints of mechanical armatures, reinforcing the notion of a body understood as a system of moving parts. The surface gains a dry, parchment‑like tactility, at once sensual and cerebral.

Compositionally, the cluster forms a diamond that widens toward the viewer, then tapers to a point at the bottom edge, as though the procession were anchored in the earth before dissolving upward into light. A diagonal thrust from upper left to lower right aligns the heads, echoing the accelerating descent of the later Nu descendant un escalier. Negative space is handled with equal care: pale voids around the extremities act as pauses in a piece of visual music, allowing rhythm to register before the next beat of form. Despite the stillness of pigment on canvas, the mind animates the succession into fluid movement; the eye, coaxed by overlapping silhouettes, completes the choreography.

Painted in 1911, Portrait (Dulcinea) emerges at the hinge between late Cubism and nascent Futurism. Duchamp digests Cézanne’s structural logic and grafts it onto the scientific fascination with time cultivated by Marey and Muybridge. The subject—an anonymous passer‑by ennobled by the Quixotic epithet “Dulcinea”—is secondary to the experiment: how might the static medium of painting capture the erotic frisson of disrobing, the slippery interval between clothed and naked, present and future? In devising a pictorial grammar for duration, Duchamp anticipates not only his own iconoclastic Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 and the bride‑machine of The Large Glass, but also the broader twentieth‑century quest to unshackle art from the tyranny of a single instant.