Moïse Kisling

The man sitting here is a painter himself. Moïse Kisling arrived in Paris from Kraków in 1910, and from 1913 he kept a studio and rooms on the rue Joseph-Bara in Montparnasse, which became one of the places the painters of the quarter turned up. Modigliani was among them, and the two were close.

He painted him in 1916, the third year of the war, with canvas and money both short in the quarter. The format is tall and narrow, 82 centimetres by 47, and the museum's record notes that the canvas was cut down by Modigliani himself. Kisling sits in front of a window, and there is almost nothing else in the picture.

Modigliani died in January 1920, at 35. It was Kisling who arranged the funeral and who tried to take a cast of his friend's face. The cast came out badly, the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz worked it over, and copies made from it went round the family and the friends.