Portrait of Beatrice Hastings

Beatrice Hastings came to Paris in April 1914 to work. She was the Paris correspondent of a London weekly, The New Age, and under the name Alice Morning she filed a column called Impressions de Paris week after week, carrying on through the first months of the war that began in August. She met Modigliani in Montparnasse that summer, introduced by the sculptor Ossip Zadkine, and the two of them were together for about two years.

This portrait is dated 1914, and it is one of roughly 14 he painted of her. The paint is laid on thickly in short choppy strokes, which the High Museum links to the Macchiaioli, the Italian painters of his youth who worked in patches of colour. The museum acquired it in 2019, from the collection of Doris and Shouky Shaheen.