Reclining nude with intertwined hands

Modigliani had drawn and painted the nude a great deal as a student in Florence and Venice, and then, in Paris, he left it alone for years. Among the avant-garde of Montparnasse the subject counted as academic, the stuff of art schools and the official Salon. He came back to it only after finishing his long series of caryatids, crouching figures that hold up a weight, and then came the large reclining nudes. This is one of them. The model lies half raised on a sofa, her hands joined. The gallery draws attention to the dark line that runs around her body and sets it apart from the fields of colour around it, which are laid on so broadly that they come close to abstraction. The museum dates it to the years between 1917 and 1919 and places it in the group painted in a flat on the rue Joseph-Bara in Paris, which his dealer, Léopold Zborowski, had rented in 1916 so that he could concentrate on painting.