Moça de camisa (A ruiva)

Modigliani painted this in 1918, not in his usual Paris but on the French Riviera. Sick with tuberculosis and worn down, he had gone south early that year, partly for the mild climate and partly to escape a Paris still under German bombardment in the last months of the war. Away from his circle of artist friends, he painted whoever was at hand, the local servant girls, shop assistants and children of Nice. This red-haired young woman is one of them, given his unmistakable treatment: the long neck, the tilted oval head, the eyes left as calm, blank almonds. He painted her in the last two years of his life, and died in Paris in 1920, not yet 36.