Portrait of Lunia Czechowska

Modigliani painted Lunia Czechowska for the first time in 1917, in a Paris worn down by three years of war. She was a young Polish woman, married, who had come into his life through his dealer Leopold Zborowski, in whose apartment Modigliani often worked. He would paint her at least seven times over the next few years, more than almost anyone else. By 1917 he was sick and drinking hard, with only three years left to live. None of that shows here. The face is calm and simplified, the neck drawn long, the eyes left almost blank, turning a real friend into the quiet, masklike type he was refining in these last Paris years.