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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from David McNeil.
Chagall excels in the present drawing with the extraordinary immediacy and freshness of the brushstrokes. With a few expressionistic lines, Chagall renders the presence of his sitter with a humoristic hint, as he quietly smokes his pipe and listens to the clock ticking. Two Chagall-esque 'accessories', which regularly appear in the artist's oeuvre, frame the figure behind him with the wall-clock and underneath him with the goat. The motif of the wall-clock comes from Chagall's mysterious childhood world, standing for the different stages of reality. It has the power to time people's lives but it also draws attention to the limits of the world of time, symbolising the frontier between the moment and eternity.
Chagall excels in the present drawing with the extraordinary immediacy and freshness of the brushstrokes. With a few expressionistic lines, Chagall renders the presence of his sitter with a humoristic hint, as he quietly smokes his pipe and listens to the clock ticking. Two Chagall-esque 'accessories', which regularly appear in the artist's oeuvre, frame the figure behind him with the wall-clock and underneath him with the goat. The motif of the wall-clock comes from Chagall's mysterious childhood world, standing for the different stages of reality. It has the power to time people's lives but it also draws attention to the limits of the world of time, symbolising the frontier between the moment and eternity.