Portrait of Beatrice Hastings

Modigliani spent the early 1910s trying to be a sculptor, carving heads in stone until the dust, his failing lungs, and the shortage of materials once the war began forced him back to paint. This portrait comes from that return, in 1915. The sitter is Beatrice Hastings, an English writer and journalist who had come to Paris to report and to write, and who was close to Modigliani for about two years. He paints her small and upright, the face simplified almost to a mask, the modelling flattened in a way his stone carving had taught him. The soft browns and greys give little sense of the turbulence between them.