Across roughly fourteen years of working life, Modigliani painted an enormous number of individual portraits: dealers, lovers, fellow artists, children of his acquaintance, residents of the neighbourhoods he passed through. Turning that same steady attention on himself was, by comparison, something he almost never did. Laura Cumming has noted how unusual this restraint looks against the wider history of self-portraiture, in which artists across earlier centuries built entire late careers around repeated self-scrutiny^[2]. Modigliani did the opposite: one picture, made once, near the end.

Rather than softening his approach or reaching for a more conventional likeness, Modigliani applied the same mannered vocabulary to his own face that he had spent years refining on other sitters: the tilted head, the elongated oval, the eyes reduced almost to blank shapes. Cumming's verdict is that he "looks just like an unusually feeble Modigliani", a description that captures how completely the late style had become his only way of seeing anyone, himself included^[2]. That style owed a clear debt to Constantin Brâncuși, under whose influence Modigliani had spent years carving stone before returning to painting, and to the Cubist and African and Egyptian sculpture he studied closely in the same period^[3].

Modigliani's health had never been reliable. As a child in Livorno he suffered pleurisy, then typhoid fever, then a further attack of pleurisy that developed into tuberculosis, an illness he never fully shook off^[1]. By the last months of his life the disease had progressed to a severe, unmistakable stage. He continued to paint through it, but his condition worsened rapidly and the periods of alcohol-induced collapse that had shadowed him for years became more frequent^[4]. He had recently become engaged to Jeanne Hébuterne, the young art student who had been his companion since 1917 and the mother of his daughter, but the discovery of how advanced his tuberculosis had become put the wedding plans in doubt^[4].