Jean-Baptiste Alexandre with a Crucifix

This one was a commission, and in 1909 that was rare. Modigliani had essentially one buyer, Paul Alexandre, a young Paris doctor who had met him two years earlier, bought from him steadily and kept hundreds of his drawings. Alexandre took the painter home to his family, and this portrait of his father came out of that. Jean-Baptiste Alexandre was a pharmacist. He sits in a black jacket against a bare wall, with a crucifix showing at the top right corner. Modigliani signed and dated it in the upper left. He still thought of himself as a sculptor at that point and would not set down the chisel for another five years. X-rays have found an earlier painting underneath the surface, a reuse of canvas that recurs across his work. The picture stayed with the Alexandre family until 1988, when Blaise Alexandre gave it to the museum in Rouen.