Joven con una rosa

Paris in 1916 was a wartime city, its young men at the front, and Modigliani was one of the foreigners left behind in Montparnasse, ill and drinking, a few years from an early death. He painted this young woman in the long-necked, mask-like manner he had settled into. He wrote a name on one of her portraits, Margherita, which was also his sister's name back in Italy, though he had not seen his family since 1913 and she was more likely a model he had found in the neighbourhood. She wears black, a single rose at her collar, her eyes left dark and almost blank. He gave many of his sitters that same inward, unreadable look.