Amedeo Modigliani was born on 12 July 1884 in Livorno. He became seriously ill with tu­berculosis twice during his youth. From 1898 he attended the art school in Livorno, in 1902 the art academy in Florence, followed by the Venice art academy in 1903. In 1906 he moved to Paris, where he became a neighbour of Pablo Picasso in the Bateau Lavoir studio building. He made intensive studies of the work of Paul Cezanne and Henri de Tou­louse-Lautrec (1864-1901), which had a last­ing effect on his early work in formal terms and in his choice of motif. From 1909-1910 he again lived in Italy where by chance he got to know the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Brancusi encouraged him to try his hand at sculpture. Most of Modigliani's paint­ings were produced between 1915 and 1919 in Paris, the subject almost always the human figure. The Paris gallery of Berthe Weill organized the artist's first solo exhibition in 1917. In 1918 he also showed his work at a joint exhibition at the same gallery. Due to his poor health he spent the winter of 1918-1919 in Nice and Cannes. Modigliani died of tubercu­losis in Paris on 24 January 1920, at the age of only 36.