Lola de Valence

The name on this picture belonged to a dancer who came to Paris with a Spanish troupe in 1862 and sat that year for Manet. Baudelaire wrote four lines of verse for the painting that came out of it. Manet's Lola passed to the French state with the bequest of the collector Isaac de Camondo, and the Camondo rooms opened at the Louvre in 1914, putting it in front of the public just as the war started. Modigliani painted this small head the following year and gave it the same title. The Metropolitan Museum, which has owned it since 1967, says the face owes nothing to Manet's dancer and everything to the stone heads Modigliani had been carving until 1914, and to the Congo masks then passing through the Paris dealers. Nobody has identified the woman who sat for it. It is painted on paper, laid down later on a wooden panel, and measures 52 by 34 centimetres.