Seated Boy with Hat

In the spring of 1918 Modigliani left a Paris under long-range German shelling and went south to the Cote d'Azur with Jeanne Hebuterne, who was carrying their child. His tuberculosis was advancing and money was short, so on the Riviera he painted whoever would sit, local children and farm boys and servants rather than the poets and dealers of Montparnasse. This seated boy is one of them, given the long neck, tilted head and quiet, masklike calm that Modigliani gave nearly everyone. He had less than two years left. The war he had fled would end that November, and he would return to Paris, where he died in early 1920 at 35.