Little Red-Haired Boy

By 1919 Modigliani had less than a year to live. Tuberculosis was closing in, and after months on the Riviera he was back in a cold Paris studio, painting whoever would sit for him, often not the poets and dealers of Montparnasse but ordinary neighbours, servants, and children like this red-haired boy. He gives the child the same treatment he gave nearly everyone that year: a long tilted neck, a small pursed mouth, eyes left as flat almond shapes with barely a pupil. People found the look strange, even unfinished. Modigliani had borrowed it partly from the African and Khmer carvings he studied at the Louvre and from his own abandoned career as a sculptor. The boy sits square to us in a plain jacket, hands out of sight, set against a bare warm-brown wall with nothing in the room to say who he was.