Cigana com Criança

Modigliani painted this in 1919, in the last full year of his life. He had spent much of the war in the south of France for his health, poor and seriously ill with tuberculosis, living with Jeanne Hébuterne, who was expecting their child. The tall, narrow canvas shows a standing woman holding an infant, her face reduced to the long oval and slit eyes he gave nearly everyone he painted. It is quieter and more tender than his famous reclining nudes. Within months of finishing work like this, in January 1920, Modigliani died in Paris at 35. The next day Jeanne, pregnant again, took her own life. The painting is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.