Amedeo Modigliani · PD
Jeanne Hébuterne
Details
The story
From March 1918 a German gun shelled Paris from about 120 kilometres away, and in April the dealer Léopold Zborowski moved his painters south, out of range. Modigliani went to Cagnes and then to Nice with Jeanne Hébuterne, who was pregnant, and with her mother. Their daughter was born in Nice on 29 November, 18 days after the armistice.
The canvas is dated 1918 and it is small, 46 by 29 centimetres. She faces straight out, in a soft brown hat and a yellow high-collared sweater that turns up in other portraits of her. He signed it at the upper right.
Hébuterne had trained as a painter at the Académie Colarossi and left work of her own. This picture belonged to the critic Félix Fénéon, who named Neo-Impressionism, and was sold from his collection in 1947. It reached Troyes with the modern pictures Pierre and Denise Lévy gave to the State in 1976.
