Boy in Short Pants

By 1918 Paris was worn thin by four years of war, and Modigliani, whose lungs were already failing, had been sent south to the Riviera by his dealer Léopold Zborowski, both for his health and to get clear of the fighting. Away from the Montparnasse crowd he usually painted, he turned to whoever was around him in Nice and the nearby towns, farm children, servants, ordinary local people. This boy is one of them, planted upright in his short trousers, the face drawn out long in the way that is unmistakably his. He tried to sell such portraits to wintering tourists for a few francs and mostly failed, then shipped them back to Zborowski in Paris in hope of a better price. He had less than two years left when he painted it, and died in January 1920 at 35.