Details
Marc Chagall (1887-1985)

La Basse-Cour

signed lower right Chagall Marc, gouache and pencil on paper
24½ x 18 1/2in. (62.2 x 47cm.)
Provenance
G. van Geluwe, Brussels, by 1956
Exhibited
Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Schilderijen en beeldhouwwerk uit de verzameling G Van Geluwe, Aug.-Sept. 1956, no. 58
Brussels, Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Ixelles, Chagall, no. 242
Charleroi, Cercle Royal Artistique Literaire, Hommage à Marc Chagall, 1957

Lot Essay

Although not dated, this work can stylistically be placed in a group of works painted circa 1925 in Montchauvet. The church spire behind the stone fence bears resemblances with the church tower in another Montchauvet picture (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1963, no. 380 (illustrated)). Meyer (op. cit., p. 341) writes, "Other periods in the country resulted in pictures with rural motifs...In those days, Montchauvet was a hamlet in hilly country dotted with small woods, with cows, pigs and farmyards full of poultry...Small gouaches show us the village, for example, the church and the red house on the street. Everywhere the handling is painterly, vivid, spontaneous."

The villages and the peasant life in the South of France must have reminded Chagall of his youth in the small town of Vitesk in Russia. These memories often recur in his later works combined with his current surroundings. Or, as R. H. Wilenski has put it in the catalogue introduction of the first big Chagall exhibition in the Tate Gallery in 1948, "The circumstances of his life have taken him to Moscow, Paris and New York. The Eiffel Tower, the circus, skyscrapers, and a hundred other images have entered the dream-country; but they have not driven out the village; they have only made it a shade less credible, a shade more the product of his fancy, a shade less the record of his love."

Sold with a photo-certificate by the Comité Marc Chagall dated 19 December 1990, no. 900192

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