Nude on the sofa (Almaiisa)

Modigliani painted this in Paris in 1916, in the middle of the war, around the time his dealer Leopold Zborowski began paying him a few francs a day and supplying models and a room to work in. Over the next three years he produced the reclining and seated nudes that are now his best-known work. Almost all of the models are anonymous, named only by a mood or a pose. This is one of just two he identified by name, Almaisa, the other being a standing nude he called Elvira. The elongated body and the smooth, mask-like face come straight out of the stone heads he had been carving a year or two earlier, before the dust and his failing health made him give up sculpture for good.