Painted in 1915, Femme assise devant une cheminée embodies many of the now distinct traits of Modigliani's characterization. The young girl is seen in a simple interior setting, with no surrounding detail to distract the viewer from her gaze. Her dress is simple, the only detail being a slight collar which brushes against her long, straight neck. She is placed frontally, hands clasped before her. Her character is indicated through only the slightest of details, such as her wide-set eyes which give her a dreamy, meditative look. The simplification of form, notable in all the works from this period, imbues them with an almost icon-like significance.

In his intensity of individual characterization, Modigliani holds a fairly solitary place in his epoch. One senses in his finest pictures a unique and forceful impact from the sitter, an atmosphere of special circumstance....Usually he preferred rusted colors, Mannerist elongations and those wry dislocations of his subjects' features -- see-saw eyes and pendulous noses, oval heads on tubular necks -- which are unmistakably his own. He did not need or want to change, and he had no time. But within his admittedly narrow range, he showed a remarkable sensitivity to evocative detail. He conveyed much, for example, through the placing of a model's arms, heavy with embarassment, or easy and forgotten, weak or bold, the hands often clasped in a foreground arc. In certain portraits the eyes are a dusty jade, open wide...in others still, sharp as beads, within a surrounding flaccidity. The small, pursed mouth was a favorite device, but he varied it to suggest changing shades of character and mood. (exh. cat., Modigliani, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1972, p. 13)