Haviland's importance to art history rests less on his own painting than on what he collected. He was known among painters, Picasso included, as the owner of fine private holdings of tribal sculpture, assembled at a time when almost nothing was understood about the age or origin of the pieces reaching Paris^[1]. A Fang mask from his collection was significant enough to be singled out for illustration in Marius de Zayas's 1915 study of African art's influence on modern painting, and it appeared again five years later in Carl Einstein's Negerplastik, one of the first serious scholarly treatments of the subject^[1]. Haviland moved in the same milieu as André Derain, who had begun collecting tribal masks after seeing pieces Maurice de Vlaminck brought back from a chance find in a village curiosity shop, and the two men's collections fed directly into the visual vocabulary Cubism was building through 1907 to 1914^[1]. Modigliani, whose own stone heads from these years drew on African and archaic sculpture, painted a man who had done more than most to put that material in front of Paris's painters^[2].

For most of the years between 1909 and 1915 Modigliani worked chiefly as a sculptor, carving at least twenty-two heads in stone, a technique of direct carving he had learned from his friend and Montparnasse neighbour Constantin Brancusi^[2]. The war changed that. Stone became difficult to obtain and Modigliani's fragile health made the physical labour of carving harder to sustain, so by 1915 he had turned almost entirely back to paint^[3]. The portrait of Haviland, made in the second half of 1914, sits right at this hinge. 1915 is generally treated as the real turning point in Modigliani's career, the year a well-known photograph shows him with Picasso and André Salmon outside the Café Rotonde in Montparnasse, and the year his long relationship with the English writer Beatrice Hastings was coming apart^[3]. Haviland's portrait belongs to the run-up to that shift, painted by an artist only beginning to commit himself fully to the brush again.

Haviland was born into the family behind Haviland and Co, the Limoges porcelain manufacturer whose wares had been fashionable across Europe and America since the nineteenth century. That inherited wealth let him collect art on a scale most of his painter friends could only watch. Modigliani, by contrast, arrived in Paris in 1906 already living on borrowed time financially, dependent from 1907 on his first regular patron, the doctor Paul Alexandre, and later on a rotating cast of dealers including Paul Guillaume and Léopold Zborowski^[4]. Haviland's financial support for Modigliani in these early Paris years belongs to this same informal economy of patronage, friends with money buying and sometimes simply giving to friends without it, that kept Modigliani working through repeated bouts of illness and poverty before any dealer had secured him a steady income.