The Little Peasant

By 1918 the war had pushed Modigliani out of Paris and down to the south of France, to Nice, where the light was better and his failing lungs had a chance. He was two years from death, poor and tubercular, and he spent that stretch painting the local people around him, among them this young farm worker set square in the middle of the canvas. The pose is a deliberate nod to Paul Cezanne, whom Modigliani revered, and to Cezanne's own paintings of card players and country folk in their heavy blue clothes. You can still see the thin graphite lines he drew first, mapping out the figure before he laid the colour in flat blocks over the top.