Elvira with a White Collar

By 1918 Modigliani had left wartime Paris for the sunnier south, sent to Nice and the nearby village of Cagnes-sur-Mer by his dealer, partly in hope the climate would ease the tuberculosis that was slowly killing him. He had only two years to live. There he painted local people, among them a young woman called Elvira, who lived nearby and sat for him more than once. He gives her his unmistakable stamp: the long, tilted neck, the small mouth, the eyes left as blank almond shapes, a face pared down toward a mask, echoing the African carvings and the stone heads he had once sculpted. She wears a plain dark dress with a crisp white collar, hands folded, sitting very still against a warm, empty ground.