Jeanne Hébuterne in a yellow Sweater

Jeanne Hébuterne was an art student of 19 when she met Modigliani in Paris in 1917, and by the time he painted this she was living with him and expecting their second child. He gives her the long neck, the tilted oval head and the blank almond eyes he gave nearly everyone he painted in these last years, the yellow jumper filling most of the canvas in one warm block. He was already gravely ill. In January 1920 Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis at 35, and Jeanne, 21 and nine months pregnant, took her own life the next day. She had sat for him many times over. Paintings like this one, calm and tender and made in a cold studio near the end, are much of what survives of the two of them together.