Blue Eyes (Portrait of Madame Jeanne Hébuterne)

Modigliani met Jeanne Hebuterne in the winter of 1916, in a wartime Paris where he was one more struggling painter in Montparnasse. She was an art student not yet 19, he was about 32, and by 1917 they were sharing an apartment where portraits like this one were probably made. He usually flattened his sitters into masks and left their eyes as blank almond shapes. Here he gives her the pale blue irises she actually had, which is where the picture gets its name. They would stay together until his death from tuberculosis early in 1920. Jeanne, pregnant with their second child, died two days after him.