.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Painted in 1966, Marc Chagall’s monumental composition Le songe du Roi David comes from an important series of large-scale religious paintings that occupied the artist intensively through the 1950s and 1960s. Across the vast expanse of the vibrantly colored canvas, Chagall explores a grand, multi-figure scene that centers on a dream or vision of the ancient King David, a key figure from the Old Testament who fascinated the artist throughout his long career. Here, under David’s watchful gaze, a dynamic cast of characters gather to celebrate the union of a bride and groom standing beneath a small chuppah. Alongside the crowd encircling the central couple, a series of vignettes hover along the edge of the canvas, suggesting different stories, legends and memories, while in the upper right corner an artist at his easel gazes across the scene, perhaps a symbolic self-portrait of Chagall. Beneath, a cluster of buildings anchor the composition in the familiar world of the artist, with small domestic dwellings recalling Chagall’s childhood home of Vitebsk featured alongside the iconic form of the Eiffel Tower.
Chagall’s fascination with spiritual and religious imagery had its roots in his childhood in Vitebsk, which was dominated by the rituals of the Jewish religious calendar, its stories, prayers and ceremonies. “Every holy day brought its own atmosphere,” his wife Bella Chagall wrote in her memoir, recalling how each feast day had its own customs, food and traditions, that brought the town to life (quoted in J. Wullschlager, Chagall: Love and Exile, London, 2008, p. 29). In addition, religious celebrations were typically colored by the practices of the Jewish sect of Hasidism, to which Chagall’s extended family belonged, who sought an intuitive communion with God through joy, faith, ecstatic prayer, music and dance. These events and experiences left a vivid mark on the impressionable young artist’s imagination and, though Chagall did not continue to actively practice religion through his adulthood, his upbringing remained integral to his sense of identity and creative outlook. In works such as Le songe du Roi David, for example, Chagall infuses the scene with the jubilant spirit of the religious festivals and traditions he witnessed as a youth, filling the canvas with a lively sense of movement and music, as many of the figures carry instruments, or engage in free, spontaneous forms of dance that, at points, verge on the acrobatic.
Following his return to France at the end of the Second World War, Chagall embarked upon a cycle of paintings devoted to religious subjects, which he later referred to as “Le Message Biblique.” Originally intended to adorn the Chapelle du Calvaire in Vence, Chagall later changed his mind and decided to donate seventeen works from this series to establish a museum dedicated to the artist’s work in Nice, known today as the Musée national Marc Chagall. He was intensely aware of the historical and spiritual significance of such subjects. However, as Chagall explained in 1973, he did not intend to advance any particular doctrine with these images. Rather, the artist hoped that they would offer people of all ages and backgrounds, faiths and creeds, a means to find “a certain peace…, a certain spirituality, a religiosity, a meaning to life. To my way of thinking, these paintings do not illustrate the dream of a single people, but that of mankind” (quoted in B. Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, 2003, p. 173). Seeing the Bible as a human story, Chagall believed that spiritual imagery was in need of constant reimagining and renewal to remain relevant to a twentieth-century audience. With this in mind, he boldly forged a highly individual and inventive approach to religious themes in his art, creating powerful compositions that spoke to a diverse range of people and faiths.
In many ways, the paintings that formed part of “Le Message Biblique” were a continuation of the dynamic illustrations of the Bible that Chagall had created for Ambroise Vollard at the beginning of the 1930s, focusing on scenes from the Old Testament. To prepare for that project, Chagall had voyaged through the Holy Land in the spring of 1931, before travelling to Amsterdam to study the Biblical paintings of Rembrandt, and in 1934 venturing to Spain to see the masterworks of El Greco. These experiences fed his creativity and shaped his approach to religious painting through the ensuing years—alongside the roughly one hundred etchings he created for the Vollard commission, Chagall completed a myriad of gouaches and paintings depicting Kings, Prophets, angelic beings and other characters from Biblical stories, allegorical objects and symbolic motifs. These would resurface in his paintings through the 1950s and 1960s, as he explored these subjects anew, working on a much larger scale that evoked murals, stained glass windows, and other forms of public art.
The character of King David was a particularly important leitmotif for the artist—typically portrayed with the iconography that emphasized his role as a talented musician and author of the Psalms, holding a small harp in one arm, he represented a great leader within the Jewish faith. In Le songe du Roi David, King David occupies the far right of the scene, his form swathed in a deep purple hue, as he sits on a monumental throne. At the center of the composition the willowy figures of a bride and groom accompanied by a young child appear as if within a spotlight of golden paint, their forms significantly larger than the crowd that surrounds them. Together, they appear to represent the core of David’s dream indicated by Chagall’s choice of title—his vision for a long and prosperous lineage.
One of the most striking elements of Le songe du Roi David is the vibrancy and richness of its palette, with the artist deploying jewel-like primary colors, complemented by touches of purple, green and orange, to bring the scene to life. For Chagall, color had always been one of the most integral elements of a composition, describing it as “the pulse of a work of art” (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, Connecticut, 1995, p. 180). Across the canvas, color is built up in layers of stippled and gestural brushwork, the delicately variegated play of pigment showcasing the deftness of Chagall’s mature painterly technique during this stage of his career. Among the softly diffused passages of color, the figures are delineated with clear, calligraphic outlines, while carefully placed touches of pigment grant their forms a sense of three-dimensionality and presence. The interplay between the varying tones across the composition also generates an elegant sense of centripetal movement, drawing our eye repeatedly towards the couple at the center of the painting, reinforcing their position as the heart of King David’s vision.
Executed on an enormous canvas that stretches over nine feet in width, Le songe du Roi David was included in a number of important exhibitions after its completion, including the artist’s retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1967. The painting remained with Chagall until his death, and was purchased by the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in 1989.
Chagall’s fascination with spiritual and religious imagery had its roots in his childhood in Vitebsk, which was dominated by the rituals of the Jewish religious calendar, its stories, prayers and ceremonies. “Every holy day brought its own atmosphere,” his wife Bella Chagall wrote in her memoir, recalling how each feast day had its own customs, food and traditions, that brought the town to life (quoted in J. Wullschlager, Chagall: Love and Exile, London, 2008, p. 29). In addition, religious celebrations were typically colored by the practices of the Jewish sect of Hasidism, to which Chagall’s extended family belonged, who sought an intuitive communion with God through joy, faith, ecstatic prayer, music and dance. These events and experiences left a vivid mark on the impressionable young artist’s imagination and, though Chagall did not continue to actively practice religion through his adulthood, his upbringing remained integral to his sense of identity and creative outlook. In works such as Le songe du Roi David, for example, Chagall infuses the scene with the jubilant spirit of the religious festivals and traditions he witnessed as a youth, filling the canvas with a lively sense of movement and music, as many of the figures carry instruments, or engage in free, spontaneous forms of dance that, at points, verge on the acrobatic.
Following his return to France at the end of the Second World War, Chagall embarked upon a cycle of paintings devoted to religious subjects, which he later referred to as “Le Message Biblique.” Originally intended to adorn the Chapelle du Calvaire in Vence, Chagall later changed his mind and decided to donate seventeen works from this series to establish a museum dedicated to the artist’s work in Nice, known today as the Musée national Marc Chagall. He was intensely aware of the historical and spiritual significance of such subjects. However, as Chagall explained in 1973, he did not intend to advance any particular doctrine with these images. Rather, the artist hoped that they would offer people of all ages and backgrounds, faiths and creeds, a means to find “a certain peace…, a certain spirituality, a religiosity, a meaning to life. To my way of thinking, these paintings do not illustrate the dream of a single people, but that of mankind” (quoted in B. Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, 2003, p. 173). Seeing the Bible as a human story, Chagall believed that spiritual imagery was in need of constant reimagining and renewal to remain relevant to a twentieth-century audience. With this in mind, he boldly forged a highly individual and inventive approach to religious themes in his art, creating powerful compositions that spoke to a diverse range of people and faiths.
In many ways, the paintings that formed part of “Le Message Biblique” were a continuation of the dynamic illustrations of the Bible that Chagall had created for Ambroise Vollard at the beginning of the 1930s, focusing on scenes from the Old Testament. To prepare for that project, Chagall had voyaged through the Holy Land in the spring of 1931, before travelling to Amsterdam to study the Biblical paintings of Rembrandt, and in 1934 venturing to Spain to see the masterworks of El Greco. These experiences fed his creativity and shaped his approach to religious painting through the ensuing years—alongside the roughly one hundred etchings he created for the Vollard commission, Chagall completed a myriad of gouaches and paintings depicting Kings, Prophets, angelic beings and other characters from Biblical stories, allegorical objects and symbolic motifs. These would resurface in his paintings through the 1950s and 1960s, as he explored these subjects anew, working on a much larger scale that evoked murals, stained glass windows, and other forms of public art.
The character of King David was a particularly important leitmotif for the artist—typically portrayed with the iconography that emphasized his role as a talented musician and author of the Psalms, holding a small harp in one arm, he represented a great leader within the Jewish faith. In Le songe du Roi David, King David occupies the far right of the scene, his form swathed in a deep purple hue, as he sits on a monumental throne. At the center of the composition the willowy figures of a bride and groom accompanied by a young child appear as if within a spotlight of golden paint, their forms significantly larger than the crowd that surrounds them. Together, they appear to represent the core of David’s dream indicated by Chagall’s choice of title—his vision for a long and prosperous lineage.
One of the most striking elements of Le songe du Roi David is the vibrancy and richness of its palette, with the artist deploying jewel-like primary colors, complemented by touches of purple, green and orange, to bring the scene to life. For Chagall, color had always been one of the most integral elements of a composition, describing it as “the pulse of a work of art” (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, Connecticut, 1995, p. 180). Across the canvas, color is built up in layers of stippled and gestural brushwork, the delicately variegated play of pigment showcasing the deftness of Chagall’s mature painterly technique during this stage of his career. Among the softly diffused passages of color, the figures are delineated with clear, calligraphic outlines, while carefully placed touches of pigment grant their forms a sense of three-dimensionality and presence. The interplay between the varying tones across the composition also generates an elegant sense of centripetal movement, drawing our eye repeatedly towards the couple at the center of the painting, reinforcing their position as the heart of King David’s vision.
Executed on an enormous canvas that stretches over nine feet in width, Le songe du Roi David was included in a number of important exhibitions after its completion, including the artist’s retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1967. The painting remained with Chagall until his death, and was purchased by the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in 1989.