Cafe Singer

French painters had been putting cafe-concert singers on canvas for 40 years before this, catching them on stage and mid-song under the footlights. Modigliani, in Paris in 1917, sat his singer down. She is shown from the knees up in a black dress, her hands in her lap, looking down and to the left, with two black lines behind her elbows that read as the rail of a chair. The title names her trade, and that is all anyone has. No source identifies her. The canvas passed from Leopold Zborowski, the dealer keeping Modigliani in paint that year, to a Paris owner and then to London, where it was exhibited in 1926. The New York collector Chester Dale bought it in May 1927 and left it to Washington in 1963. Modigliani signed it in the upper right corner.