Portrait of Frank Burty Haviland

Modigliani painted this in Paris in 1914, the year everything in his life narrowed. Until then he had wanted to be a sculptor, carving long stone heads in a Montparnasse courtyard, but the dust was wrecking his lungs and the coming war cut off his supply of stone. So he went back to painting faces, and carried the sculptor's habits with him: the long neck, the mask-like calm, the head tilted as if cut from a block. The sitter, Frank Burty Haviland, was a fellow painter and collector in the same poor, crowded quarter, one of the friends who bought Modigliani's work when almost no one else would. The two knew each other from the cafes of Montparnasse.