Jeanne Hébuterne with Hat and Necklace

The woman in the hat was a painter herself. Jeanne Hebuterne was 19 and studying at the Academie Colarossi in Paris when the sculptor Chana Orloff introduced her to Modigliani in the spring of 1917, and she went on making her own pictures, still lifes, interiors, self-portraits, through the three years they had together. He painted her more than 20 times, beginning that year, and never as a nude. Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis in January 1920, and she killed herself two days later, at 21. Her family gathered her canvases from the studio and kept them out of public view for the rest of the century. Only a small number of her paintings are known today.