Portrait du peintre Léopold Survage

Modigliani painted this in 1918, the year he left wartime Paris for the calmer light of Nice on the Riviera, along with a small group of other artists sheltering from the war in the south. The sitter is Léopold Survage, a Russian-born painter and one of the few real friends Modigliani kept, the two having met years earlier at the Café de la Rotonde in Montparnasse. Modigliani gives him the long neck, tilted head and slit, almond eyes that mark all his portraits, painting a fellow artist with plain directness rather than flattery. He himself was already gravely ill with tuberculosis and had less than two years to live. The picture is now in Helsinki, the only Modigliani oil in a Finnish collection.