Cypresses and Houses at Cagnes

Cypresses and Houses at Cagnes is one of only four landscapes Amedeo Modigliani is known to have painted, all during his stay in the South of France in 1918 and 1919. The artist had left Paris for the Riviera near the end of the First World War with his companion Jeanne Hébuterne, living in Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer, the hillside town where Pierre-Auguste Renoir spent his final years. Departing from the portraits that dominate his work, Modigliani structured the scene with tall cypresses and sunlit houses, rendered with a Cézanne-like sense of order and simplified planes of color. The canvas is signed in green at the lower right. It passed through the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume to Albert C. Barnes and has remained in the Barnes Foundation collection ever since.