Woman in a Black Dress

The sitter has never been identified. Modigliani painted her in Paris in 1917, and she comes down to us without a name. She is seen half length in a black dress against a flat grey ground, her hands folded one over the other in her lap, and the Geneva museum that holds the canvas titles it after those hands, Les Mains croisees. Its older name was Femme en robe noire, woman in a black dress.

Her passage through the market came fast. On 29 October 1927, less than eight years after the artist died, the painting was lot 108 at the Hotel Drouot in Paris, in a sale of modern pictures from one private collection. Within two years it was being reproduced in a New York book on Modigliani, by which time his prices had climbed well past anything he was paid in his lifetime. It reached Geneva in 1988, on deposit from a private foundation, and has stayed there since.