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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from David McNeil.
Chagall spent most of the winter of 1907-1908 in St. Petersburg, where he earned money as a retoucher for a local photographer. However, he made frequent visits to his hometown, and to a small town nearby Lyozno, where his grandfather worked as a butcher. It seems that this work was drawn in Lyozno, offering an amusing fragment of Russian provincial life, with a short plump man clinging on to a taller woman and trying to lead the dance, with a glass in his left hand.
This clumsy dance echoes the drawing Le Bal of 1907 (M 3), an almost satirical depiction of peasants treading and stamping on each other's feet in an attempt to dance. As well as underlining the rustic life of these people in the present sketch, Chagall counterparts the banal realism of his first art teacher, Jehuda Pen, who specialised in academic-style portrait and genre paintings of the Salons.
Although Chagall did not yet know Van Gogh's or even Pieter Brueghel's works, La Danse au village is certainly close in subject and spirit to the latters' scenes of drunk peasants dancing and feasting.
Chagall spent most of the winter of 1907-1908 in St. Petersburg, where he earned money as a retoucher for a local photographer. However, he made frequent visits to his hometown, and to a small town nearby Lyozno, where his grandfather worked as a butcher. It seems that this work was drawn in Lyozno, offering an amusing fragment of Russian provincial life, with a short plump man clinging on to a taller woman and trying to lead the dance, with a glass in his left hand.
This clumsy dance echoes the drawing Le Bal of 1907 (M 3), an almost satirical depiction of peasants treading and stamping on each other's feet in an attempt to dance. As well as underlining the rustic life of these people in the present sketch, Chagall counterparts the banal realism of his first art teacher, Jehuda Pen, who specialised in academic-style portrait and genre paintings of the Salons.
Although Chagall did not yet know Van Gogh's or even Pieter Brueghel's works, La Danse au village is certainly close in subject and spirit to the latters' scenes of drunk peasants dancing and feasting.