Young Woman in a Shirt

In April 1918 the dealer Léopold Zborowski took Modigliani out of Paris, which was under long-range German shellfire that spring, and down to the Côte d'Azur with his companion Jeanne Hébuterne and the painter Chaïm Soutine. Modigliani spent most of that year at Cagnes and in Nice, painting local people instead of his Paris circle, and their names were mostly never written down. This red-haired young woman has never been identified. The picture has gone under a run of titles over the years, the red-haired girl, the young Swedish woman, the little milkmaid, and the catalogue of his work lists two more canvases of the same sitter. It is in Vienna, in the Batliner collection, which has been at the Albertina since 2007.