Portrait of Max Jacob

Max Jacob was a poet from Quimper in Brittany, a fixture of Picasso's Montmartre and later of Montparnasse, and the man who introduced Modigliani to the dealer Paul Guillaume at the end of 1914. Born into a Jewish family, he had himself baptised a Catholic in February 1915 and asked Picasso to stand as his godfather. In 1944 he was arrested and died at the Drancy camp outside Paris.

Modigliani painted him in 1916, in a city three years into the war. He wrote the sitter's name into the canvas twice, at the top left and the top right, and signed and dated it in the lower right corner. A second portrait of Jacob from these years is in Cincinnati.

Guillaume's gallery had this one before 1923, then the couturier Paul Poiret owned it for two years. The state collection in Dusseldorf bought it at a Paris auction in 1965. An export dispute held it up, and it reached the museum in 1972.