La bella massaia

Modigliani painted this in 1915, with the First World War draining Paris of money and materials. Canvas was not something a poor painter wasted, and X-rays of this picture show two, maybe three earlier paintings underneath. He simply worked over them, letting the buried colours push up through a wicker basket he added on top. His subject is a young woman in the white collar and apron of domestic service, her eyes left blank, one darker than the other. He wrote the title across the top himself. The French word menagere means both housewife and housemaid, and he seems to have enjoyed the slippage between the two.