Autoportrait

Amedeo Modigliani painted portraits all his life, of lovers, dealers, poets, and fellow artists, but almost never of himself. This is the one self-portrait he's known to have made, and he painted it in 1919, roughly a year before he died in Paris at 35, worn down by tuberculosis and hard living. He shows himself wrapped up warmly, a palette in his hand, eyes narrowed to slits in the long stylized mask he gave nearly all his sitters. He turned that same face on himself. The canvas left Europe in 1947, bought by the Brazilian industrialist Francisco Matarazzo, and now hangs in a university museum in Sao Paulo, far from the Montparnasse cafes where he worked.