Jeanne Hébuterne with nude shoulders

Modigliani and Jeanne Hébuterne spent 1918 on the Riviera, partly to get away from the German long-range gun that was shelling Paris, and their daughter was born in Nice that November. They came back to Paris in 1919, and this portrait belongs to the months after the return. Hébuterne was a painter herself, a student at the Académie Colarossi when they met two years earlier, and she sat for him more than 20 times. He never painted her nude. Bare shoulders, as here, are as far as those portraits go. The picture has never belonged to a museum. The collector Roger Dutilleul owned it from 1922 to 1940, and it has been in a private collection in Paris ever since, coming out for exhibitions in Tokyo and Osaka in 2008.