This month, we’ll be featuring Summer of Love, a four-part series on artists who painted the same individual—over and over and over again. The relationships between the two range from muse to lover to daughter, with no two cases the same.

Modernist painter Amedeo Modigliani was a bit of a playboy. An Italian by birth and a bohemian by choice, he was entangled in a series of brief and messy romantic affairs from the moment he moved to Paris in 1906. One of his lovers, Maud Abrantès, was a wealthy woman probably also involved with his patron, Paul Alexandre; another mistress, Canadian artist Simone Thiroux, may have birthed a son that Modigliani refused to recognize; Russian poet Anna Akhmatova had a short fling with the painter from 1910–11. Years later Akhmatova wrote, in her memoir, of the destitute and solitary Modigliani: “He seemed to me encircled with a dense ring of loneliness.”

But all that changed when he met the woman he described to friends as his “best beloved,” young Parisian artist Jeanne Hébuterne. Modigliani and Hébuterne were inseparable from 1917 onwards for the last three years of both of their lives, a period of relative stability for the free-spirited artist. Hébuterne was his love and his muse, appearing in around 20 portraits during their short but profound involvement.

Springtime in Paris, 1917

Modigliani and Hébuterne met during the spring of 1917 at life-drawing classes at the Académie Colarossi, a progressive art school he had attended since first moving to Paris. Hébuterne, then 19 years old, was a new student, encouraged to pursue her innate artistic ability by her brother, André (himself a painter). Though Hébuterne and Modigliani were going to the same live model sessions (she formally enrolled and paying tuition, he likely sitting in for free), they were introduced by a mutual friend, sculptor Chana Orloff.

Hébuterne was an aspiring artist who showed a talent for drawing from a young age. Today, her legacy is mostly confined to being Modigliani’s ginger-haired muse, but roughly 25 paintings are attributed to her from those years (including one portrait of Modigliani). Despite the expectations of the conventional, middle-class Parisian family she was born into, she followed her dreams and went to art school.

Needless to say, her parents weren’t thrilled when she soon shacked up with an artist 14 years her senior, living in squalor. Hébuterne’s parents objected to the couple’s age difference, unmarried status, and the impoverished conditions they lived in together at their studio apartment on Rue de la Grande Chaumière. It also didn’t help that Modigliani was a notorious alcoholic.

Hébuterne didn’t care; she was devoted to Modigliani. Soon after moving in with him, she became pregnant with their daughter, Jeanne Modigliani, born during the fall of 1918. By the spring of 1919, she was pregnant again.

“A strange girl, slender, with a long oval face”

Modigliani’s relationship with Hébuterne coincided with the final period of his short career, a phase characterized by a calmer, understated aesthetic. His lines grew longer and more graceful, and his palette became richer.

Modigliani had always painted portraits, including some of his Parisian painter friends, such as Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Chaim Soutine, and Leopold Survage. But no sitter appeared on his canvases as frequently as Hébuterne, who he painted more than 20 times.

Affection was obviously one reason she was such a recurring subject, but Hébuterne’s unusual features may have also contributed to her repeated cameos in Modigliani’s work. Cubist sculptor and friend Jacques Lipchitz described her as “a strange girl, slender, with a long oval face, which seemed almost white rather than flesh color.” Modigliani’s portraits elongate her face even more, stretching her head and neck in the style of the post-Renaissance Mannerists, from the artist’s native Italy. He paints Hébuterne like a modernist Madonna, occasionally with (his) child.

He also highlights the signature auburn color of her hair, a hue that earned Hébuterne the nickname of “Noix de Coco” (“coconut”) at the Académie Colarossi for the stark contrast between her terra-cotta-toned locks and her pale skin.

For his part, Modigliani was nicknamed “Modi” when he moved to Paris—a play on the French word “maudit” which means “cursed.” Indeed, the artist had bad luck when it came to his health—he contracted tuberculosis as a child and was frequently ill. Perhaps knowing that his time was destined to be short-lived, he once told Lipchitz that he wanted “a brief but intense life.”

This prophecy came true on January 24, 1920, when Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis at a Parisian charity hospital. Only a few weeks earlier, he had optimistically scribbled in his sketchbook: “A new year. Here begins a new life.”

Hébuterne, then eight months pregnant with their second child, was immensely distraught and went back to her childhood home with her parents. Ultimately, though, she decided she couldn’t live without Modi; the next day she jumped out of her parents’ fifth-floor apartment window, killing both herself and her unborn child.

Like a 20th-century Romeo and Juliet, the star-crossed lovers now share a single (and popularly visited) tombstone at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. His epitaph reads: “Struck down by death at the moment of glory.” And hers: “Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice.”