Marc Chagall

Valentine Chagall, Saint Paul de Vence

Private Collection, California

James Goodman Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 2003

Pushkin & Leningrad Museums, Chagall Centennial, 1987

Moscow, Centre of Arts, Marc Chagall: Paintings, Graphics, 2002, no. 32, illustrated in the catalogue

Hugh Lauter Levin, Chagall Discovered, From Russian & Private Collections, New York, 1988, no. 85, illustrated in color p. 130

Excellent condition. Original canvas. Under UV, no evidence of retouching.
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Themes of love and devotion were enormously popular in Chagall's art. Many of these pictures paid tribute to the artist's wife Bella, who had died in the 1940s, but whose image lived on in the artist's later work. Usually these depictions featured tender exchanges between young couples and celebrated the blissfulness of their love. The subject of the present painting is friendship, one of the many facets of the complex relationship of two young lovers.

In the present work, Chagall used deep marine blue and emerald green, investing the picture with the luminous tonality of stained-glass. In addition to the couple, unidentified figures appear throughout the composition and enhance the dream-like and magical quality of this scene. Dicussing similarly-themed paintings, Susan Compton has written: "It was a vision of 'real' love, that love which the artist was to share with his wife Bella [...] this celebration by the lovers is equally fantastic, for their joy has levitated them from the ground. Their faces are real enough, but now their position is imaginary. Yet by this device Chagall has conveyed the magic carpet of human love, borrowed perhaps from the world of the folk tale, where the hero and heroine live happily ever after" (S. Compton, Chagall (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Art, London, 1985, pp. 15-16).