Rose blouse

Modigliani spent a year in the south of France for his lungs and came back to Paris in the spring of 1919. This canvas belongs to the months after that, the last full year he worked.

The room is the unusual thing in it. He normally set a sitter against a flat, more or less abstract ground, and here an iron bedstead stands behind the woman and a framed picture hangs on the wall. The museum compares the setting with a portrait of 1918 now in Los Angeles, which has the same kind of literal interior. It names no sitter, and files the picture as Portrait of a Woman, called The Pink Blouse.

The couturier Jacques Doucet bought it in 1923 on the advice of the writer André Suarès and had Pierre Legrain make the frame it still carries. It came to Avignon with Doucet's heirs, whose house opened as a museum in 1996.