Portrait of Béatrice Hastings

The woman in this portrait was in Paris on a job. Beatrice Hastings, born Emily Alice Haigh in England and raised in South Africa, was the Paris correspondent of the London weekly The New Age, filing a column called Impressions de Paris under the name Alice Morning through the war years. She met Modigliani in 1914, he painted her 14 times over the two stormy years that followed, and this canvas comes at the end of them. He was working close to Cubism just then, and he cut her into flat, blocky planes with her name lettered across the picture. A strip of newspaper was once pasted to the surface. The paper itself is gone, and the ink it left behind is still visible in the background, just under the letters of her name. Albert Barnes bought the painting in Paris from the dealer Paul Guillaume in January 1925.