Painter Modigliani, an Italian Jew, has fallen in love with Jeanne, a beautiful Catholic girl. The couple have an illegitimate child, but Jeanne's bigoted parents send the baby to a faraway convent to be raised by nuns. Distraught by the loss Modigliani vows to find the money to raise his child and with the arrival of Paris's annual art competition he sees, as does his friend and rival Pablo Picasso, his opportunity. An enjoyable, if perhaps slightly imaginative, dramatization of the artist's rise to fame.