Landscape of the Midi

Modigliani almost never painted landscapes; he was a painter of long-necked faces, and famously wary of anything else. This is one of only a handful of landscapes he ever made, and they all come from a single stretch of his life. In 1918 his dealer had sent him and several other artists south to the French Riviera, away from wartime Paris and, in Modigliani's case, in the hope that the mild air would ease his failing lungs. Down there, among the hills and trees near Nice, he turned for once to the countryside in front of him. He was back in Paris by 1920, and dead that January, of tuberculosis, at 35.