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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from David McNeil.
After illustrating Gogol's Les Âmes Mortes in 1923 and the Fables de la Fontaine in 1926, both commissioned by Ambroise Vollard, twenty years later, the publisher Kurt Wolff (Pantheon Verlag) asked Chagall to produce the illustrations for the Arabian Nights. By 1946, Chagall had moved to America and he executed these fascinating gouaches and drawings during a trip to Paris, discovering once again the atmosphere and light of the French capital.
The present lot and lot 625 are part of the thirteen pen and ink drawings published in 1948 together with thirteen coloured lithographs in Chagall's illustrated book Four Tales from the Arabian Nights. These were inspired by the powerful magic in Shahrazad's tales of A Thousand and One Nights, out of which Chagall selected four classic love stories: The Ebony Horse, Julnar the Sea-Born and her Son King Badr Basim of Persia, Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman, and Kamar Al-Zaman and the Jeweller's Wife.
After illustrating Gogol's Les Âmes Mortes in 1923 and the Fables de la Fontaine in 1926, both commissioned by Ambroise Vollard, twenty years later, the publisher Kurt Wolff (Pantheon Verlag) asked Chagall to produce the illustrations for the Arabian Nights. By 1946, Chagall had moved to America and he executed these fascinating gouaches and drawings during a trip to Paris, discovering once again the atmosphere and light of the French capital.
The present lot and lot 625 are part of the thirteen pen and ink drawings published in 1948 together with thirteen coloured lithographs in Chagall's illustrated book Four Tales from the Arabian Nights. These were inspired by the powerful magic in Shahrazad's tales of A Thousand and One Nights, out of which Chagall selected four classic love stories: The Ebony Horse, Julnar the Sea-Born and her Son King Badr Basim of Persia, Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman, and Kamar Al-Zaman and the Jeweller's Wife.