El joven aprendiz

Modigliani painted this around 1918, in the last stretch of a short life. He would be dead of tubercular meningitis by early 1920, at 35. During the war his dealer Leopold Zborowski had sent him south to the coast near Nice, away from a cold Paris that was ruining his lungs, and there he painted the local people who would sit for a few francs: children, servants, working boys. The apprentice slumps to one side, one arm hanging, in the long-necked, mask-like manner Modigliani used for nearly everyone. He had trained as a sculptor and never quite stopped drawing faces as if he were carving them. The picture later joined the collection of the dealer Paul Guillaume, which is how it reached the Orangerie.