Lot Essay
In 1926, following the success of Chagall's illustrations for Le Cirque Vollard, the dealer Ambroise Vollard commissioned Chagall to provide etchings for an edition of La Fontaine's Fables. In 1926-1927 Chagall worked on a series of gouaches from which a hundred were chosen and given to a team of etchers under the direction of Maurice Potin, who prepared the plates in the manner of eighteenth-century color prints.
During this period Chagall traveled to the countryside to reacquaint himself with rural life. With his family he stayed at Mourillon near Toulon and later at Chambon, where he painted thirty of the gouaches.
It is not the moral of the fable that Chagall brings to the fore, but the familiar relation to animals that is echoed in the text. Since his first stay in Paris, Chagall's animal symbolism was based on the age-old relation of man to beast; now instead, the primitive sense of the animal story transpires throughout the narrative as symbolic idiom... Animal stories are not the only themes of Chagall's illustration of the 'Fables'. About one third of the total deal with La Fontaine's human tales in verse... In some cases the models were probably the peasants of Chambon...
But Chagall's pleasure in sensual power matched his own joviality and eagerness to enjoy life. The liberty and success he found in France, the sense of his own powers, and the discovery of a joy-giving world of light and colour, lent his life a vital elation that makes him say today: 'That was the happiest time in my life.'" (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1961, p. 350)
During this period Chagall traveled to the countryside to reacquaint himself with rural life. With his family he stayed at Mourillon near Toulon and later at Chambon, where he painted thirty of the gouaches.
It is not the moral of the fable that Chagall brings to the fore, but the familiar relation to animals that is echoed in the text. Since his first stay in Paris, Chagall's animal symbolism was based on the age-old relation of man to beast; now instead, the primitive sense of the animal story transpires throughout the narrative as symbolic idiom... Animal stories are not the only themes of Chagall's illustration of the 'Fables'. About one third of the total deal with La Fontaine's human tales in verse... In some cases the models were probably the peasants of Chambon...
But Chagall's pleasure in sensual power matched his own joviality and eagerness to enjoy life. The liberty and success he found in France, the sense of his own powers, and the discovery of a joy-giving world of light and colour, lent his life a vital elation that makes him say today: 'That was the happiest time in my life.'" (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1961, p. 350)