Head of a girl (Louise)

Modigliani signed this one in the top left corner, up beside the girl's head. Her own name is not on it. Louise travels with the picture through the catalogues, and they record nothing else about her, no surname and no story. He painted her in Paris in 1915, and the picture is small, about 51 centimetres high. Modigliani is among the most forged painters of the 20th century, which is why a number matters here. This head is 94 in the catalogue Ambrogio Ceroni built between 1958 and 1970, a list of 337 paintings that auction houses and museums still treat as the test of a real Modigliani. Until 2023 it belonged to a Dutch private foundation, the Triton Collection, which sold it that November in New York.