Retrato de Madame Cécile Van Muyden

Modigliani rarely worked to order. He mostly painted the friends, lovers, and fellow artists around him in Montparnasse. This is one of the exceptions, a commission. The sitter is Cécile van Muyden, born Crinsoz, a Swiss woman who with her husband moved in the same circle of artists, writers, and musicians. She was about 25 when she posed, around 1916, in the middle of the war, when Paris was short of everything and Modigliani was chronically poor and ill. He dresses her in black against a plain, brushy ground and gives her his usual treatment: the long neck, the tilted head, the narrow eyes left almost blank. The face is recognizably hers and, at the same time, smoothed toward the mask-like type he painted again and again.