Paul Guillaume

Modigliani lettered the month onto this picture in Italian, down the right edge: Settembre 1915. Paris was in its second autumn of the war, and both the painter and his sitter were still in the city because the army had turned them down on health grounds. Paul Guillaume was 23. He had opened his first gallery the year before, on the rue de Miromesnil, where he hung African carvings on the same walls as new French painting, and he had recently rented Modigliani a studio in Montmartre. He was the first dealer to take the painter on. The Toledo Museum of Art reads the setting as Guillaume's library, with a bookcase behind one shoulder and a piano behind the other, and the sitter's name runs along the bottom in block capitals. Modigliani painted him four times across 1915 and 1916.