1. Jeanne Hebuterne -- 1000 pcs, Amedeo Modigliani
2. Portrait of a Young Girl -- 1000 pcs, Amedeo Modigliani
3. Woman with Black Tie -- 1000 pcs, Amedeo Modigliani

In the few but intense working years of his short and colourful life, Modigliani forever changed portraiture in modern Western art. He was born 12 July 1884, at Livorno Italy, into an impoverished Jewish family with artistic inclinations.

His first love was for sculpture, which flourished as a trade in the working classes throughout Italy, but the stone chips and dust interfered with his breathing, perhaps provoking asthma, and made him even more sickly than he was already. Some two dozen sculptures survive. In these, he was remarkable for carving the stone directly, working from an image in his mind's eye to stone "in the round", without use of clay models to guide his chisel strokes. He wrote "L'Artiste: Je forgerais une coupe et cette coupe de ma Passion sera le receptacle." ("The Artist: I hammer out a blow and this blow of my Passion will be the receptacle.")

Something of the stonemason's technique passed over into paint and canvas -- the most definitive mark of Modigliani's style is that he commonly leaves the orbs of the eyes blank, without iris or pupil, in the way that statuary is done. In fact, he would leave the eyes of his subjects with the same colour paint as the backgound wall, so that one gets the disturbing idea that this is just a mask lacking all substance, not flesh but an apparition.

He found his other great inspiration in the museums of Paris, in their archaeological exhibits. In all his works, both paint and sculpture, one may readily discern influences from nearly every civilisation, except his native European! He was fascinated by erotic sculptures of India and the Khmer and by African masks. But, unlike say Gauguin, Modigliani himself never travelled -- his knowledge came in vicariously through experiences of others.

Worldly success eluded Modigliani in his own lifetime. He lived the bohemian life, working hard and partying harder, his manic bursts of creativity broken by bouts with the bottle and drugs. He lived from hand to mouth, tossing off works of art in exchange for food and lodging. He found his greatest muse at age 33 in the person of Jeanne Hébuterne, a teenaged art student. She adorned his bed and all his finest canvasses for the next thirty months. By all accounts, their life together was happy -- a magical whirl of parties, soirées and debaucheries -- but the deprivations of the War (1917) broke his health for good. They had one child together, a daughter, who became his biographer. Modigliani took ill and died in January 1920, of meningitis. Jeanne was eight months pregnant, with a son. She jumped to her own death from their balcony the day after her beloved died.