Portrait of Beatrice Hastings before a door

Modigliani made this in 1915, in a Paris emptied out by the war. Too sick with tuberculosis to be called up, he stayed in Montparnasse and painted the people around him. The woman at the door is Beatrice Hastings, an English poet and journalist who wrote for a London magazine and had come to Paris to work. For about two years she and Modigliani were together, in a relationship heavy with drink and quarrels, and he painted her at least 14 times. She turns up in these portraits under different guises, sometimes elegant, sometimes hard. Here she stands very upright against a plain door, her features pared down to the long oval and slender nose he gave nearly everyone he drew.