Beatrice Hastings was the pen name of Emily Alice Haigh (1879-1943), an English writer, poet and literary critic. Born in London and raised in South Africa, just before the war, she moved to Paris and became a figure in bohemian circles due to her friendship with Max Jacob. She shared an apartment in Montparnasse with Amedeo Modigliani, having a tempestuous relationship with the artist for two years, and she posed for him for several paintings. Much of her work was published in The New Age under a variety of pseudonyms and she lived with the editor, A. R. Orage, for a time before the outbreak of the First World War. It is believed she was bisexual and was a friend and lover of the modernist author Katherine Mansfield, whose work was also published in The New Age.
The following 1915 oil painting of Hastings once again signals Modigliani’s preference for sculptural depictions of his subject, with simplistic outlines and a rigid pose. A sense of disillusion is created by the chair back appearing to the left of the sitter, but being strangely absent on the right. The sharp, mask-like features of the sitter’s face indicate a tense and cold environment shared between the artist and his model.