Madame Hanka Zborowska Leaning on a Chair (Madame Hanka Zborowska accoudée à une chaise)

In March 1923 the Philadelphia collector Albert Barnes bought this canvas from a Paris dealer. Six weeks later it was hanging in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as number 24 in a show of 75 modern European works, and the city's critics went after the whole thing. One paper wrote that the room seemed infested. Barnes stopped lending his pictures after that and kept them in a foundation of his own outside the city, which is where this one has stayed.

The sitter was Hanka Zborowska, a Polish woman who had been living in Paris since before the war. She posed for Modigliani more than a dozen times over several years, always clothed, and he addressed her as Madame Zborowska throughout. He painted her leaning on the chair in 1919, the year before he died. Under the thin white paint of her dress, the graphite lines he drew first are still visible.