Portrait de Madame Dorival

By 1916 Modigliani had given up the sculpture he loved. He had wanted to be a carver, and spent a couple of years cutting stone heads under the spell of his neighbour Brancusi, until dust, poverty and bad lungs forced him back to paint. You can still see the sculptor in this portrait. He gives Madame Dorival, the wife of a Comedie-Francaise actor, a long carved neck and a smooth mask of a face, and he leaves her eyes blank, without pupils, the way a stone head has no pupils. Paris was at war that year, and Modigliani, rejected as unfit to serve, stayed in Montparnasse painting the people around him. She sits against a plain wall, turned slightly, saying nothing.