Léopold Zborowski

Around 1916 a Polish poet named Léopold Zborowski, stuck in Paris by the war and living off dealing in books and prints, took Modigliani on. The arrangement was practical: 15 francs a day, canvas and colours, models paid five francs a sitting, and a room to work in at the flat on the rue Joseph-Bara where Zborowski lived with his wife. For the rest of Modigliani's working life the materials, the models and the rent came through him.

This is the dealer himself, in a brown suit with a small book in his hands, and at 116 centimetres it is the largest of the portraits Modigliani made of him.

The canvas went to Stockholm with the Swedish dealer Gösta Olson. In November 1920 Olson wrote that he had traded the big Zborowski portrait back to Zborowski.