Nude with Coral Necklace

Modigliani painted more than two dozen female nudes, and nearly all of them come from the last few years of his life. This one is from 1917. The canvas is wider than it is tall, just over a metre across, and the woman lies along the whole of it, a coral necklace at her throat and her own hand resting low on her body. The pose is old. Titian and Giorgione had laid women out like this, and so had Goya and Manet. What Modigliani took away was everything around her, the room, the drapery, the excuse of a myth.

The back of the canvas once carried an inscription with a Paris address and the year. Later it belonged to the novelist Francis Carco, and after him to Felix Feneon, the critic who coined the word Neo-Impressionism and who had stood trial in Paris as an anarchist in 1894. A New York dealer sold it in 1950 to Joseph and Enid Bissett, whose money came from the Maidenform brassiere company, and in 1955 the Bissetts gave it to the college museum at Oberlin, Ohio.