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Lot Essay
Marc Chagall enjoyed the late summer and autumn of 1930 in the small town of Peyra-Cava in the Alpes-Maritimes region of France with his wife, Bella, and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Ida. Chagall often traveled with his family during the late 1920s, visiting Alpine towns like Chamonix and the region of Savoie. The Chagall family's travels were made possible by the increasing financial stability the artist enjoyed, thanks in part to his new representation by the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris and his recent collaboration with the art dealer Ambroise Vollard.
In Paysage à Peïra Cava ou Les Chardons, Chagall depicts an open window, looking out onto a misty morning in the forest. In the foreground, there is a singular empty chair and a table covered with a white tablecloth. A small notebook and a glass sit on the table. To the left, a glass vase holds a large bouquet of thistles, noted in the work’s title, Les Chardons. Thistles were common around Peyra-Cava and bloomed during the summer and autumn. Their inclusion in the picture helps anchor this dreamlike scene in reality: a fresh bouquet like this would naturally have been in Chagall’s room during the months he spent in Peyra-Cava. Beyond the window, the brilliant orb of the sun and towering evergreen trees have been obscured by a dense fog. This fog seems to seep into the room through the open window, covering both the interior and exterior in a hazy gray light.
Paysage à Peïra Cava ou Les Chardons represents a more naturalistic turn in Chagall's painting style. In his Peyra-Cava landscapes, Chagall turned to a favorite compositional device: the secondary “frame” of an open window. This framing structure had become popular with Chagall’s contemporaries. Matisse, for example, included windows throughout his 1920s Nice interiors series. For Chagall, he saw window frames as a magical threshold between a sublime natural world and an artist’s serene domestic environment. When Chagall painted landscapes, he depicted them in a primarily naturalistic manner, but often included incongruous elements as a way to mix realism and fantasy—a central theme of his practice. In Paysage à Peïra Cava ou Les Chardons, the fantastical element comes from the painting’s palette. Instead of depicting the scene in naturalistic colors, Chagall painted the scene in shades of gray with the inclusion of subtle green, blue, and purple accents in the shadows. The result is a composition imbued with a gentle, otherworldly stillness; as Lionello Venturi asserted, “Chagall does not descend into his landscape. He views it from afar, as if spellbound, dreaming of love with open eyes” (quoted in F. Meyer, op. cit., New York, 1963, p. 381).
In Paysage à Peïra Cava ou Les Chardons, Chagall depicts an open window, looking out onto a misty morning in the forest. In the foreground, there is a singular empty chair and a table covered with a white tablecloth. A small notebook and a glass sit on the table. To the left, a glass vase holds a large bouquet of thistles, noted in the work’s title, Les Chardons. Thistles were common around Peyra-Cava and bloomed during the summer and autumn. Their inclusion in the picture helps anchor this dreamlike scene in reality: a fresh bouquet like this would naturally have been in Chagall’s room during the months he spent in Peyra-Cava. Beyond the window, the brilliant orb of the sun and towering evergreen trees have been obscured by a dense fog. This fog seems to seep into the room through the open window, covering both the interior and exterior in a hazy gray light.
Paysage à Peïra Cava ou Les Chardons represents a more naturalistic turn in Chagall's painting style. In his Peyra-Cava landscapes, Chagall turned to a favorite compositional device: the secondary “frame” of an open window. This framing structure had become popular with Chagall’s contemporaries. Matisse, for example, included windows throughout his 1920s Nice interiors series. For Chagall, he saw window frames as a magical threshold between a sublime natural world and an artist’s serene domestic environment. When Chagall painted landscapes, he depicted them in a primarily naturalistic manner, but often included incongruous elements as a way to mix realism and fantasy—a central theme of his practice. In Paysage à Peïra Cava ou Les Chardons, the fantastical element comes from the painting’s palette. Instead of depicting the scene in naturalistic colors, Chagall painted the scene in shades of gray with the inclusion of subtle green, blue, and purple accents in the shadows. The result is a composition imbued with a gentle, otherworldly stillness; as Lionello Venturi asserted, “Chagall does not descend into his landscape. He views it from afar, as if spellbound, dreaming of love with open eyes” (quoted in F. Meyer, op. cit., New York, 1963, p. 381).