Tree and House

Modigliani is the painter of long-necked faces, so a landscape from him is a genuine oddity. He made only four in his whole life, all of them in the south of France in 1918 and 1919. He had left Paris partly out of fear of the wartime shelling and partly because his lungs were failing, and the sun near the Mediterranean was meant to help. This is one of those four. A cypress and a house with a warm-coloured roof, built up in the same narrow range of green, beige and orange-red he used for the others, the forms simplified almost as if the tree were sitting for a portrait. He was back in Paris within months, and dead of tuberculosis in January 1920, not yet 36.