Le jeune apprenti

early 1906

Moves to Paris

With a small sum his mother has managed to gather, Modigliani moves to Paris, which he has dreamed of for several years, hoping to find understanding and stimulus among the city’s artists. He spends his first months in museums and churches, then rents a small studio in Montmartre and begins attending the Académie Colarossi.

spring 1907

Dr Paul Alexandre, his first patron

In the spring of 1907 Modigliani moves into a house that the young doctor Paul Alexandre rents to young artists. Alexandre becomes his first patron, and their friendship lasts seven years: he buys drawings and paintings (his collection will hold 25 paintings and 450 drawings) and arranges portrait commissions for the artist.

spring 1910 – August 1911

The affair with Anna Akhmatova

In the spring of 1910 Modigliani meets the young Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, five years his junior; their passionate infatuation lasts until August 1911, after which they never meet again. Akhmatova takes 16 portraits of herself back to Russia.

1916

Léopold Zborowski, friend and dealer

Modigliani befriends the Polish poet and art dealer Léopold Zborowski and his wife Anna; in the artist’s final years Zborowski is his primary dealer and friend. He lends Modigliani his apartment, supplies models and painting materials, and pays him between fifteen and twenty francs a day.

spring 1917

Meets Jeanne Hébuterne

In the spring of 1917 the Ukrainian sculptor Chana Orloff introduces Modigliani to a 19-year-old art student, Jeanne Hébuterne, who has posed for Foujita. Her conservative, devoutly Catholic family renounces her for her liaison with a Jew, but she soon lives with Modigliani anyway and becomes a principal subject of his art.

24 January 1920

Died