Amedeo Modigliani

Modigliani reached Paris in 1906 from the Italian port of Livorno and settled in Montparnasse, then packed with poor immigrant artists, many of them Jewish like him. What he wanted above all was to be a sculptor, carving long stone heads under the influence of his neighbour Brancusi and the African masks then flooding the city's dealers. He had carried tuberculosis since boyhood, and the stone dust tore at his lungs, so around 1914 he set down the chisel and turned to paint.

What he made there is unmistakable: faces drawn out long, necks stretched, eyes often left as blank almond shapes with no pupils. He worked fast, frequently for a few francs or a meal, and drank and took drugs hard. A landlord who seized his canvases against unpaid rent is said to have used them to patch old mattresses.

In 1917 he met Jeanne Hebuterne, a young art student who became his companion and the subject of some 20 portraits. His health gave way, and in January 1920 he died of tubercular meningitis at 35, by then well known in the cafes but still barely selling. Jeanne, nine months pregnant with their second child, jumped from a fifth-floor window the next morning.