La bella verdulera

Modigliani painted this in 1918, the last full year of the First World War and one of the last of his own short life. Sick with the tuberculosis that would kill him within two years, he had left the cold and the bombing of Paris for the south of France, sent there by his dealer to rest and keep working. Away from the poets and painters of Montparnasse, he turned to the ordinary people around him, servant girls, children, local shopkeepers like this young vendor. He gives her the calm, mask-like face he gave nearly all his sitters, the long neck, the almond eyes, the small tilted head. He was in his early thirties when he painted her, with only two years left to live.