Portrait of Maude Abrantes

In 1908 Modigliani showed his work publicly in Paris for the first time, at the Salon des Independants. He was 24 and had almost no money, and canvas cost money, so he painted on both sides of this one. Turn it over and there is a second painting, a nude woman in a hat, standing upside down in relation to the portrait on this face. Catalogues disagree about which of the two counts as the front, and the museum numbers them as one object, A and B.

Beyond her name, very little is firmly established about Maude Abrantes herself. The canvas belongs to the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa, and in 2022 it was X-rayed for a technical study of Modigliani's painting. Three more compositions showed up inside it, figures he had started and then covered over.