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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this watercolor.
In 1923, the poet Blaise Cendrars introduced Marc Chagall to the art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard. The following year, Vollard gave Chagall a commission for a book of illustrations for Gogol's Les Ames Mortes which Chagall worked on from 1923-1925. This commission was followed by subsequent commissions for Le Cirque Vollard and La Fontaine's Fables and together they afforded Chagall his first meaningful financial security. With the funds, he was able to travel extensively in the French countryside, living for brief periods in the regions of the Pyrénées, Rivièra and Brittany.
The villages and the peasant life he encountered on these sojourns reminded Chagall of his native Russia and his youth in the small town of Vitebsk. The paintings from this period are dominated by rural landscape subjects and Franz Meyer observes, "periods in the country resulted in pictures with rural motifs...small gouaches show us the village, for example, the church and the red house on the street. Everywhere the handling is painterly, vivid, spontaneous" (Marc Chagall, New York, 1963, p. 341). During this time, Chagall also explored the use of the window frame as an integral part of his composition. In the present gouache, he contrasts the geometrical, flat plane of the window frame with the expansive village landscape that can be seen through it. Into this scene he adds the figure of a man, suspended in the sky, carrying a bouquet of flowers, perhaps as an embodiment of his personal sense of happiness with his life with his wife Bella and his artistic freedom. He underscores this sense of ebullience through the intensity of his palette of vivid green, red, white and blue-grey tones and use of sinuous line.
In 1923, the poet Blaise Cendrars introduced Marc Chagall to the art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard. The following year, Vollard gave Chagall a commission for a book of illustrations for Gogol's Les Ames Mortes which Chagall worked on from 1923-1925. This commission was followed by subsequent commissions for Le Cirque Vollard and La Fontaine's Fables and together they afforded Chagall his first meaningful financial security. With the funds, he was able to travel extensively in the French countryside, living for brief periods in the regions of the Pyrénées, Rivièra and Brittany.
The villages and the peasant life he encountered on these sojourns reminded Chagall of his native Russia and his youth in the small town of Vitebsk. The paintings from this period are dominated by rural landscape subjects and Franz Meyer observes, "periods in the country resulted in pictures with rural motifs...small gouaches show us the village, for example, the church and the red house on the street. Everywhere the handling is painterly, vivid, spontaneous" (Marc Chagall, New York, 1963, p. 341). During this time, Chagall also explored the use of the window frame as an integral part of his composition. In the present gouache, he contrasts the geometrical, flat plane of the window frame with the expansive village landscape that can be seen through it. Into this scene he adds the figure of a man, suspended in the sky, carrying a bouquet of flowers, perhaps as an embodiment of his personal sense of happiness with his life with his wife Bella and his artistic freedom. He underscores this sense of ebullience through the intensity of his palette of vivid green, red, white and blue-grey tones and use of sinuous line.