La Ruche, the Beehive, stood in the Dantzig Passage near the old Vaugirard slaughterhouses. It had been built for the 1900 World's Fair, then dismantled and rebuilt as a warren of studios for artists who could not afford anywhere better^[2]. Painters including Marc Chagall, Soutine, Fernand Léger and Modigliani all held studios in the building at one point, mostly on its upper floors^[2]. Soutine, Chagall and Modigliani formed a loose grouping of Jewish and Italian émigrés who had no real stake in any single Parisian art movement and remained, in a cultural sense, outsiders throughout their careers^[2]. It was inside this milieu, poor, improvised, and thick with mutual borrowing of models, materials and encouragement, that Modigliani got to know Soutine well enough to paint him several times. The portraits that came out of that friendship, wherever they now hang, register a closeness built on shared poverty and shared ambition rather than on any formal sitting arranged through a dealer.

Soutine and Modigliani arrived at portraiture from opposite directions. Modigliani flattened and elongated his sitters, working towards a calm, mask-like simplicity with almond eyes and a long unbroken neck^[4]. Soutine did the opposite: he distorted a face by piling on paint, using colour and thickened surface to push a likeness towards something closer to raw sensation than description, a manner critics have traced back to Van Gogh's example^[3]. In his mature work Soutine painted uniformed figures, cooks, choirboys, valets, treating the fabric of a costume with the same fleshy, vibrating substance he gave to skin^[3]. Painting a fellow artist meant painting someone whose own eye worked nothing like his own. Whatever this particular canvas shows of Soutine's features, it was made by an artist who had spent years perfecting an almost opposite vocabulary: reduction and line, not accumulation and impasto.

Léopold Zborowski, a Polish poet turned art dealer, became Modigliani's main support from around 1917 and represented Soutine as well^[1]. He let Modigliani use rooms in his own apartment as a studio, and one of Modigliani's most famous portraits of Soutine was painted directly onto a door in Zborowski's flat^[1]. Zborowski kept faith with Soutine through the hardest years of the First World War, later taking him to Nice to escape the German advance on Paris^[1]. This is the same dealer who supported Modigliani's own family of sitters and models in these years, his wife Anna among them, so the web connecting Modigliani, Soutine and their patron was a tight, overlapping one. Whether or not Zborowski had any direct hand in this particular canvas is not recorded, but the professional and personal circle in which it was made is well documented.