Bouquet de roses rouges

Bouquet de roses rouge depicts an embracing couple framed by the succulent fruits and vibrant red roses of summer. Along with the rooster and moon, these evoke the totems of Marc Chagall's radical early works, but incorporated into this tranquil image they are representative of the artistic programme and personal circumstances that came to define Chagall's later works. In 1952 Chagall had married Valentina Brodsky, or 'Vava', and with this marriage ended the years of tension and anxiety that had marked his work in the years during and after the Second World War and the fraught period of his relationship with Virginia McNeil. With the stability that his new marriage brought him and in the calm comfort of his home in Vence, by the mid-1950s he had developed the lyrical and sensual style that marks the greatest of his later works, incorporating the flowers and plants of the South of France, bathed in the brilliant light of the Provençal sun.

These works were powerfully symbolic of the rebuilding and reconciliation of post-war Europe in which Chagall sought to be artistically involved; Bouquet de roses rouges was executed in the same year that Chagall accepted an invitation to paint a mural in the foyer of the new Opera House in Frankfurt and also designed stained-glass windows for the Cathedral in Metz, to replace the opera house and stained-glass windows that had been destroyed during the war. It was Chagall's intention that the harmony and serenity that pervades his work from the mid-1950s, with their simple narratives and spiritual messages of love and peace, should serve as an artistic balm after the horrors of war.