Portrait of Léopold Zborowski

In 1918 Amedeo Modigliani was gravely ill with tuberculosis, and Paris was within range of German long-range guns in the last year of the war. His dealer, a Polish poet named Leopold Zborowski, gathered him and a few other painters and took them south to the Riviera, hoping the warm air would help. Zborowski had been keeping Modigliani afloat for two years, paying him a small daily wage for canvases and finding him models. This is one of about six portraits Modigliani made of him in return. He gives Zborowski the look he gave almost everyone, a long neck, a tilted oval head, narrow eyes with no pupils, so the sitter seems both present and far away. Within two years Modigliani was dead at 35, and Zborowski was left trying to sell pictures that had barely found buyers.