Les paysans

Marc Chagall’s luminous Les paysans, executed in 1976, belongs to the final decade of Chagall’s long career, a period in which the artist, now firmly established in the South of France and enjoying international acclaim, returned nostalgically to the imagery of his native youth. Here, in gouache illuminated with flashes of vivid watercolours, brush and wash, and pen and India ink, Chagall evokes a timeless rural scene that merges memory, folklore and reverie.

The composition assembles several of the motifs most closely associated with the artist’s pictorial language. A bearded peasant in traditional garb, palms outstretched in an expressive, almost theatrical gesture, dominates the upper half of the sheet. Opposite him a maid, her red dress reflected in her rosy cheeks, tenderly greets the cow that stands between them, its bowed head garlanded with blossoms. Behind, a domed church and simple cottages recall the architecture of Chagall’s native Vitebsk, anchoring the vignette in the remembered landscape of his childhood, while above a hovering rooster presides over the rustic scene.

This sense of harmony between the landscape and its denizens originates from Chagall’s very first memories in rural Vitebsk and remains central to his practice throughout his career. As the artist himself observed: “The fact that I made use of cows, milkmaids, roosters and provincial Russian architecture as my source forms is because they are part of the environment from which I spring and which undoubtedly left the deepest impression on my visual memory of the experiences I have.” (Chagall, quoted in B. Harshav (ed.), Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, 2003, p. 83). Tellingly, in the present work a lone figure, set apart from the fantasy village, turns back to gaze at the central trio, possibly echoing a deep-seated longing in Chagall for his lost home.

For Chagall, Vitebsk was doubly sacred, both as the site of his earliest artistic memories and as the place he met his beloved Bella Rosenfeld, whom he married in 1915. By the end of the 1940s both Bella, who died in 1944, and the artist’s childhood vision of Vitebsk, irrevocably transformed by war, had been consigned to memory. Les paysans may thus be read as a wistful daydream, an ode to a vanished world celebrated through the pastoral charms of rustic life. Suffused with delicate washes of blue, green, red and yellow, the scene hovers between reality and dream, imbuing humble motifs with the ethereal aura that is quintessentially Chagallian. In doing so, the artist offers an intimate meditation on memory and belonging, a poetic daydream of the nostalgic inner world he carried with him throughout his life.