In the 1950s Chagall celebrated his love of Paris in a number of works depicting the city's famous landmarks. Paris had increasingly taken the place of Vitebsk as Chagall's symbolic home and he painted a series of thirty canvases of the city which were then exhibited at Galerie Maeght in the 1950s: "Chagall's whole heart and his mind were involved in this theme. He projected his passionate love of Vitebsk on to Paris. He was fully aware of doing so, for he knew that he needed to be possessed by this kind of love for a place; this sanctification ...was necessary to him, he needed a holy city. From now on it was to be Paris..the monuments of Paris are themselves motifs in the life of Chagall" (J. Cassou, Chagall, London, 1965, pp. 220, 223).

In the Paris cycle of 1950s paintings the recurrent motifs of Chagall's life are present: the cockerel, the farm animals, the flowers and the lovers. Returning to this theme again in the 1970s, La Mariée de Notre-Dame contains similar motifs, enriched with the pure, dazzling colours so characteristic of his mature oeuvre. In this work a bride soars above the cathedral of Notre-Dame, which glows red beside the cool, blue banks of the Seine. A great flourish of flowers fills the entire upper area of the canvas, with the familiar image of a cockerel outlined in the greenery.

Sold with a photo-certificate from the Comité Marc Chagall dated 5 May 1994.