Léopold Zborowski was a Polish poet and writer, born in Warsaw in 1889 into a Jewish family, who came to Paris and turned to art dealing^[1]. By around 1917 he had become Modigliani's primary dealer, taking over from Paul Guillaume, who had represented the artist from 1914 to 1916^[2]. Zborowski did more than sell Modigliani's paintings: he let the artist use his own apartment as a studio, organised Modigliani's exhibitions, and stood as one of his few reliable sources of income during years of chronic poverty^[1]. He represented several other artists from the same Montparnasse circle at the same time, including Chaïm Soutine, Maurice Utrillo and André Derain, and was the first dealer for the sculptor René Iché and for Marc Chagall^[1]. The friendship between Zborowski and Modigliani went back further than the dealership itself: as early as 1915, Modigliani had drawn a nude portrait of Zborowski in the guise of John the Baptist, a mark of the trust between them well before the formal arrangement began^[1].

Modigliani's portraits are often built on a set of exaggerations he applied to almost every sitter: elongated necks, flattened oval faces, blank almond eyes, small pursed mouths, all set on a diagonal tilt^[3]. In the Zborowski portraits, those conventions are present but deliberately gentled. The neck is drawn strong and powerful at its base, giving an impression of authority rather than fragility, and the diagonal set of the eyes is softened by half-lowered lids and a boyish cast to the features^[1]. The beard and moustache, which could easily have been reduced to a flat mask in Modigliani's hands, are instead rendered with real delicacy, and there is no visible sign of correction or reworking in the paint^[1]. Of the sitters closest to Modigliani, only Jeanne Hébuterne appears in as sympathetic a light. The care taken here reads as a deliberate departure from Modigliani's more detached treatment of strangers and casual models, and it matches what is known of the two men's relationship: not simply dealer and artist, but a friendship that carried Modigliani through his hardest years.

Modigliani painted Zborowski's portrait three times. This canvas, held by the São Paulo Museum of Art, is one of the two versions that survive in named public collections; the other is held by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem^[1]. A third portrait of the sitter is also recorded among Modigliani's works^[1]. The three paintings share the same basic vocabulary, the elongated neck, the beard, the half-closed eyes, but each treats the pose and background slightly differently, in keeping with Modigliani's habit of returning to sitters he knew well and reworking their likeness rather than repeating it. Zborowski's household, including his wife Anna, whom Modigliani also painted, sat for the artist repeatedly through the years of their close association, making the Zborowski family among the most thoroughly documented sitters in his output, in sharp contrast to the many undocumented models drawn from Montparnasse's wider circle.