La Jeune bonne (The Servant Girl)

In the spring of 1918 the dealer Leopold Zborowski took Modigliani and a small group of his painters out of Paris, then under long-range German shelling, down to Nice and Cagnes on the Mediterranean coast. Modigliani's lungs were bad, and the sitters who had paid him in Montparnasse were now hundreds of miles away, so he worked with the people around him: village children, farm hands, domestic servants. The museum in Buffalo that owns this picture identifies her as Marie Feret, a country girl from the south of France, and dates the canvas to about 1918. She stands full length on a canvas roughly five feet tall and two feet wide. Buffalo bought it in February 1939, five weeks after the gallery there opened its Room of Contemporary Art, a fund and a space set up to buy new work.