Seated nude with shirt

Through the winter of 1917 Modigliani was working in a room on the rue Joseph-Bara in Montparnasse, in the building where his dealer lived. Leopold Zborowski, a Polish poet who had taken on selling his pictures, paid him 15 francs a day and paid the women who sat for him five francs a session. He made about 13 seated nudes between 1916 and 1919, most of them in 1917, and this is one. The museum in Villeneuve-d'Ascq states that the sitter cannot be recognised from the way the face is painted, and no source gives her a name. She holds a white shirt across herself, the one pale thing against a deep red ground. In her hair the strands were drawn into the wet paint with the wooden end of the brush.