Portrait de femme

This was painted in 1918, and by then Amedeo Modigliani was very ill and far from Paris. His dealer, Leopold Zborowski, had taken him south to the Riviera, partly to escape the food shortages and the German shells reaching wartime Paris, partly for the sea air, since his tuberculosis was closing in. He had a little under two years left. The woman here wears a sailor's striped collar, and in the bottom corner, easy to miss, is the top of a baby's head. It reads as a portrait of a modern mother, self-possessed and plainly of her own time. Zborowski owned it first, and from there it travelled through Paris and New York before reaching Denver.