Madame Hanka Zborowska

Modigliani painted this portrait in 1918, one of a group of pictures he made of the small circle around his dealer, Leopold Zborowski, the Polish poet who housed and fed him in his last years. For a long time the woman was known as Hanka Zborowska, the dealer's wife, and the painting still carries her name. Scholars now think it is more likely Lunia Czechowska, a close friend of the Zborowskis whom Modigliani painted many times. Either way, the treatment is the one he gave nearly everyone by then, the long oval face, the slender neck, the eyes left as flat almond shapes with no pupils. He worked fast and from life, turning whoever sat for him into a version of the same quiet, elongated type.