Flower Vendor

Modigliani spent 1918 and the first months of 1919 in the south of France, away from the Montparnasse writers and dealers who usually sat for him. Without them he painted whoever was to hand, servants, shop girls, farm children, people who worked for a living. This tall canvas, dated 1919, belongs with that group. French catalogues list it as a seated young woman, known as the flower seller. She has never been identified, and the trade in the title is a name the picture picked up rather than anything recorded about her.

In August 1919 a show of modern French art opened on the top floor of Heal's furniture shop in London, and 59 of the paintings in it were his, more than by any other artist there. The canvas itself went first to the Paris dealer Louis Libaude, and reached the Metropolitan Museum in 1996 as a bequest from the collector Florene Schoenborn.