Young woman in a yellow dress (Renée Modot)

In the spring of 1918 German long-range guns were shelling Paris, and the dealer Léopold Zborowski moved Modigliani, Jeanne Hébuterne and the painter Chaïm Soutine south to the Riviera, where there were also wintering buyers to sell to. Much of the French film business had gone the same way. Gaston Modot, an actor Modigliani had known in his Montmartre years, was in Nice shooting a costume film at a studio fitted up in a villa at Cimiez, and Modigliani would come round to the Modots' place in the afternoons to paint. The collection that owns this picture names the woman as Renée, whom Modot married the following year. Gaston sat for him too. The flowered dress and the patterned ground behind her are unusual for him, and so is the way her pupils sit at the right-hand edge of her eyes, which the researchers who studied the painting for a 2022 exhibition found nowhere else in his portraits.