Cyprès et maisons à Cagnes

Modigliani painted almost nothing but faces, so a landscape from his hand is a rarity; only a handful exist. He made this one at Cagnes, on the Riviera near Nice, where he had gone in 1918 to escape wartime Paris and to nurse lungs already ruined by tuberculosis. The tall cypresses and the blocky pink and ochre houses lean and tilt the way the necks in his portraits do, as if he couldn't quite switch off the way he saw people. It is dated 1919. By January of the next year he was dead in Paris, at 35.