 My name is Nancy Eisen, I'm the Gun Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation. Now, I'm working from my apartment today, like so many of us, but what I want you to do is to imagine that you're actually in the Barnes Foundation with me at the moment, and we're in room 10 and we're looking at the west wall. And the work that I want to focus on is the one right at the centre of this ensemble. It's a picture by Modigliani, and it shows a woman with urban hair in a black evening dress. So let's just focus right in on that picture now. Now, this work was made in 1918, and Modigliani was a young artist at this time. He's Italian, so he was born in 1884 in Italy, and he moved to Paris to make a living as an artist. Now, this was not an unusual thing to have done. If you had any ambition at all as an artist in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, you wanted to be in Paris. It really was the centre of the art world. And of course, it was also a place to meet people, people from all over the world were going there, and it had a very free and easy society. So, Modigliani had come from Italy, which was quite conservative. In Paris, he could paint models, he could meet artists and poets and writers. And I imagine that this woman, whose name we don't know, is one of those Bohemians that he would have spent time with. And really, what an extraordinary person I want to focus in on her face here. Now, what's interesting is that some of the things we might take for granted now, at the time Modigliani made this painting would have been quite unusual. So, let's start with that urban hair and just take a moment to enjoy the way in which Modigliani really enjoys the kind of colours in that. Those little splashes of red, sometimes drawing in a little bit. You can see those little black marks for the bangs, and really just enjoying that tussled style. Now, this would still be a bold style to wear today. But in 1918, the fact that a woman had short hair was already noteworthy. Just a couple of decades before then, it would not have been at all acceptable for women to wear their hair short. So really, viewers would have seen this portrait as an image of a really modern woman. The other thing that helps us to identify this lady as a style setter is her makeup. And you can see there, Modigliani has used a fine brush to just paint in the eyes. It looks as if there's, you know, perhaps a little bit of coal, a little bit of eyeliner at work. Her eyebrows seem very drawn in. And then, of course, she's wearing lipstick and rouge. Modigliani uses the same red just to kind of give us those little highlights. Really working the paint wet surface onto wet surface there. And I also want to draw attention to her dress and goodness me, that is one daring neckline. Really, though, you get an sense that this model doesn't care. There's a real ownership of the person that she is, the thing that she's doing. And it's interesting to think that during the First World War, so that's the 1914 to 18 war, women were having unprecedented freedoms in Paris. Most of the young men had gone off to fight. Women were starting to work in the factories. They were starting to live independently. Perhaps they weren't having children. This was a moment where women were starting to be much more independent and modeling was quite lucrative. So although it might not have been the thing that everybody approved of, far from it, it was definitely seen as a pretty risque profession. This woman was probably earning good money from doing it and taking her place amongst the poets and writers and Bohemians of Paris. The other thing that we can see from this painting is the way in which Modigliani paints. And I just want to focus in on the treatment of flesh here. You can sense that Modigliani is using a heavy brush, maybe with a round end, and he's really almost kind of stabbing the canvas with the paint. You see this sort of iterative working of the lines. Again, wet paint on wet paint. Sometimes, perhaps even missing a little bit, we see there just in the armpit, just little parts of the blank canvas showing through. And sometimes he uses complementary colors. So if you see there's an area of green here that really helps to bring out the vibrancy of the urban hair. He uses the same green on the nose. And just there also to fill in the edge of the chair. Really the difference between the brushwork in the background or on the body and then that fine, fine treatment of the face is so very, very different. So really have a think there about the ways in which Modigliani is painting at once very careful. And yet sometimes quite messy. And people who knew Modigliani remember that he could make quite a mess when he was painting. Really had a very physical way of treating the actual task of painting. So have a lovely day then. And just I would urge you when you do get a chance to come back to the Barnes Gallery. Have a really close look at this one. We have wonderful pictures here, but it doesn't do the real object justice. So really put that on the to-do list for when things get back to normal. And please join us again for Barnes Takeout. All the best. Bye-bye.