Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz

In 1916 the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz had just married the Russian poet Berthe Kitrosser, and he asked his friend Modigliani for a portrait to mark it, partly to put a little money the painter's way. They settled on ten francs a sitting. Modigliani normally worked fast, an hour or two and done, but here he kept going for close to two weeks, probably the longest he ever spent on a single canvas. Lipchitz always suspected his friend dragged it out on purpose so he could be paid a bit more, and gently encouraged him. You can see it in the result. Jacques stands stiff and formal in a dark suit, one hand on the shoulder of Berthe, who sits below him, both faces smoothed into those long oval masks Modigliani loved. It's one of only three double portraits he ever painted. Within four years he was dead at thirty-five, and this stands as a rare, tender record of a friendship among the poor foreign artists of wartime Paris.