Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne in Dark Clothing

By 1918 the war had pushed Modigliani and Jeanne Hébuterne out of Paris and down to the south of France, where the light was better and the rents were cheaper. She was young, an art student, pregnant with their daughter, and he painted her again and again, around 26 times across these two years. Here she sits in dark clothes, her neck drawn long and her eyes left almost blank, the mannered style he had settled into after years of carving stone heads. He gave her no props and no setting, just the shape of her against a plain ground. Their daughter, also named Jeanne, was born in Nice in November 1918.