Motherhood

Modigliani came back to Paris from the Mediterranean coast in the spring of 1919, after more than a year away. He was 34, seriously ill with tuberculosis, and he had about eight months to live. This is one of the large canvases from that stretch. A woman sits in a bare interior with a small child on her knees, her head tipped over towards it.

Who she was, nobody wrote down. The museum's file gives no name, which was normal for him. He painted whoever was nearby and would sit still for an hour or two, and most of those people have reached us as a first name or as nothing at all.

The picture went north later. The collector Roger Dutilleul owned it by 1929, it passed to his nephew Jean Masurel, and Masurel's gift of 1979 founded the modern collection of the museum near Lille that shows it now.