Born to a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno, Italy, Modigliani studied briefly in Florence and Venice before moving to Paris in 1906 where he became a key member of the avant-garde art world. His portraits, known for their subtle color and elegantly elongated forms, chronicle the lives of fellow artists and poets, although the woman in this painting remains unidentified. Influenced by African masks such as those made by the Baule people of the Ivory Coast and Cubism, a style of art that stresses abstract structure over realism, the artist rendered the sitter’s features as flat, geometric planes.