L'amazzone (Donna con la giacca gialla)

Modigliani was 24 and completely unknown when he painted this in 1909, years before the long-necked nudes and portraits that made his name. He owed almost everything then to one man, a young doctor named Paul Alexandre, his first and for a while only patron. The sitter was a baroness, Marguerite de Hasse de Villers, a keen rider who liked to be shown in her riding habit, an amazon in the French sense of a horsewoman. Her jacket was actually red. Near the end Modigliani decided the red fought the picture and repainted it yellow, and the baroness, who already barely recognised herself, refused to take it. Paul Alexandre bought it instead, as he bought so much else Modigliani could not sell.