Germaine Survage with Earrings

Modigliani painted this in Nice in the summer of 1918. He had left Paris for the coast partly to escape the last year of the war and partly for his health: his tuberculosis was advanced, and his dealer hoped the southern climate might help. Living nearby was the painter Leopold Survage, a friend, and this is a portrait of Survage's wife Germaine. Modigliani gives her the mask-like calm he brought to nearly all his sitters that year, the tilted oval head, the long neck, the eyes reduced to almond shapes. The gold earrings and the soft warm colour are gentler than his sharper Paris work, as the light of the Riviera crept in. He had less than two years left, and died in Paris in January 1920, at 35.