Portrait of a Girl

Tate, in London, gives this picture no sitter. The name that follows it around, Victoria, comes from a London exhibition of 1929, nine years after Modigliani died, where it hung as Portrait of a Young Woman, Mademoiselle Victoria, and the catalogues that came after kept it. The painter Moise Kisling, who had known him in Paris, said only that the girl was English and that the portrait was a commission. Modigliani signed the canvas and left it undated, which is why scholars have placed it in 1916 and in 1917.

There is another picture underneath it. An X-ray made at Tate shows a woman seated, three-quarter length, turned slightly to the left, her hair piled up above a jagged fringe. Tate's researchers point out how close she looks to his 1915 portrait of Beatrice Hastings seated in front of a fireplace, and say there is no way of knowing for certain. Under ultraviolet light that first painting shows drying cracks, so it had stood long enough to harden before he worked over it.