Marc Chagall

Leicester Galleries, London

Museum of Fine Arts of Houston, Chagall and de Chirico, 1955

The sheet has been laid down onto cardboard along the sides. There are pinholes to the corners and the paper is slightly undulated. There are some small chips of paint loss in the lower right quadrant and in several places along the top of the sheet. There is some light abrasion to the paint surface along the edges, particularly top and bottom. The colours are fairly fresh. Held in a painted wood and plaster frame with some losses to the mouldings.
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Executed circa 1926

The authenticity of this work has kindly been confirmed by the Comité Chagall.

On his return from Russia to France in 1923 Chagall began to explore the countryside beyond Paris. He travelled to Brittany, Montchauvet and, in the summer of 1926, visited Chambon-sur-Lac in the Auvergne. He made 'the landscape, light and life of France intimately his own... If many details still recall the scenes from Russian village life, Chagall nonetheless captured the real look and feel of an old French village beneath a luminous grey late-afternoon sky... Further, his colour modulated over grey and earth tones and the finely tuned harmony of his palette truly evoke the French earth' (W. Haftmann, Marc Chagall, Gouaches, Drawings, Watercolors, New York, 1975, p.83-84). 

Chagall experimented in several different kinds of media including coloured lithography, ceramics and sculpture, but gouache was one of the most important in his oeuvre. The important 'circus' series of 19 works commissioned by Ambroise Vollard in 1927 for example, was executed entirely in gouache. He began working in this medium in Paris in the early 1910s and his highly successful 1914 solo exhibition at Galerie der Sturm in Berlin comprised 40 paintings and 160 gouaches, watercolours and ink drawings. The present work is a superb example of the rich, almost luminous tones, matt texture and decorative possibilities offered by the medium. As Picasso remarked, 'When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who knows what colour really is'.