Marie

By the spring of 1918 German long-range guns were shelling Paris and bombers were crossing it at night. Modigliani's dealer, Léopold Zborowski, gathered his painters and took them south to the Côte d'Azur, out of range. In Nice, away from the Montparnasse artists and models he usually worked from, Modigliani painted the people who were simply around him, the servant girls, farm children and young working women of the town. This is one of them. The name he attached, fille du peuple, a daughter of the people, marks her as exactly that, not a patron or a fellow painter. He gives her the long neck and tilted oval face he gave nearly everyone that year, and the narrow eyes left blank, without pupils. The picture reached Basel much later as a bequest from a Swiss doctor, Walther Hanhart.