Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne

In the spring of 1918 German long-range guns were dropping shells on Paris, and Modigliani's dealer, Léopold Zborowski, sent him south to the coast around Nice, out of the cold and the danger. Modigliani was already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him, and travelling with him was Jeanne Hébuterne, an art student not yet 19 and pregnant with their first child, born that November. He painted her again and again, and six portraits survive from this stretch of 1918 and 1919. In them her face is tipped and lengthened, the neck drawn out, the eyes often left blank and blue. The elongation is Modigliani's own, a signature he had built partly from the African and Cycladic carving he loved. He worked fast and cheap, on whatever canvas Zborowski could supply. Little more than a year after this, in January 1920, Modigliani died at 35, and Jeanne, pregnant again, took her own life two days later.