La cameriera

Modigliani painted this young serving girl in 1916, one of the many ordinary Parisians he set down during the war years, waiters and servants, the people around him in Montparnasse rather than paying sitters. She has the long neck, sloping shoulders and small tilted head he gave nearly everyone, and her eyes are left almost blank, filled in flat with colour rather than detail. He was living hand to mouth then, kept afloat by his dealer and friend Leopold Zborowski, who fed him and bought his work when almost no one else would. Modigliani died in 1920 at 35, and the picture reached the Kunsthaus in Zurich a few years after that, in 1927.