Madame Pompadour

Modigliani painted this in Paris in 1915, in the second winter of the war, and the woman under the enormous hat is Beatrice Hastings, an English poet and journalist who was his lover through two years of drink and furious quarrels. He painted her some 14 times. The title is his private joke: he calls this sharp-tongued Englishwoman Madam Pompadour, after the elegant mistress of Louis the Fifteenth, and gives her a look of amused superiority to match. Set the picture beside his flat, patterned surfaces and you can read his other borrowings in it, the long mask-like face, the tight geometry he took from Cezanne and from Cubism. She holds the whole thing together with that faint, unreadable smile.