Les loups et les brbis

In the autumn of 1925 Chagall completed his first commission for dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard, a series of etchings for an edition of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls. Vollard was pleased with the results, and Chagall suggested to him that their next collaboration be a series based on La Fontaine's Fables. In 1926-1927 Chagall completed a large number of gouaches, from which one hundred were chosen and give to a team of etchers under the direction of Maurice Potin, who prepared the plates in the manner of eighteenth-century color prints.

"The variety of this 'natural history' is quite amazing. 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. . . . 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 of my life.'" (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1961, p. 350)