Modigliani and Paul Alexandre met in the autumn of 1907, not long after Modigliani had settled in Paris and begun copying paintings in the city's galleries. Alexandre was a young medical doctor, three years older, and quickly became the artist's most reliable source of both money and encouragement^[1][2]. For seven years, from 1907 until the outbreak of war in 1914, the two men saw each other almost daily, an unusually sustained relationship for an artist whose life was otherwise marked by instability, poverty and repeated bouts of illness. Alexandre bought most of what Modigliani painted in these years, effectively subsidising his work at a stage when almost no one else was willing to.

One episode captures the pattern of the friendship well. In 1908 Modigliani painted The Horsewoman, a commissioned portrait of a sitter who has never been identified but whose surviving preparatory sketches show pronounced Slavic features, later softened in the finished canvas. The bold lines and awkward handling of the jacket, a sharp departure from the graceful society-portrait manner Modigliani had been trained in, apparently displeased the sitter, who rejected the finished picture^[1]. Rather than let the work go to waste, Alexandre bought it. It became one of many Modigliani canvases that exist today only because Alexandre stepped in when no other buyer would.

Alexandre did not just buy finished paintings. He collected Modigliani's drawings as well, rescuing sheets the artist would otherwise have discarded, sold for almost nothing, or lost in one of his frequent changes of address. Some of these drawings stayed out of public view for decades, only resurfacing long after both men were gone^[1]. When war broke out in August 1914, Alexandre was called up and sent to the front almost immediately. His demobilisation afterwards was delayed, and by the time he was free to return to civilian life, contact between the two men had lapsed for good. They never saw each other again^[1].