Portrait of Mateo Ruiz de Alegría

Modigliani's painted oeuvre consists almost entirely of portraits and female nudes. His distinctive personal style coalesced in a series of honest, penetrating portraits of friends and colleagues made between 1914 and 1916. The sitter in this portrait has been identified as Mateo Alegría, a Spanish sculptor and guitarist who frequented the cafés in the Montparnasse area of Paris and was also depicted by Modigliani in a drawing in 1915. The style of the work shows the artist's interest in abstraction and the influence of Cubism, which he knew intimately through the work of Picasso and Cézanne. Within a year of painting this portrait, Modigliani moved towards a highly mannered style with an increasingly exaggerated elongation of the neck and other bodily proportions.