Marc Chagall

Ida Chagall, Paris

Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above)

Private Collection, New York

Private Collection, Asia

Acquired from the above

London, Helly Nahmad Gallery, Love, 2000, no. 8, illustrated in color in the catalogue (titled Les fiancés and dated circa 1970)

The present composition is a quintessential example of Chagall's mastery in assembling an array of folkloric images in a dense and colorful composition. The work contains several of the most important elements of his pictorial iconography, not least of which is the village that harkens back to the artist's own youth living in the stetl.  Each figure is masterfully rendered through a matrix of intense color and spatial experimentation that epitomized Chagall's work. These elements reflect his own very personal delight in the act of artistic creation. As Susan Compton wrote in the catalogue of the Royal Academy Chagall Retrospective: "Throughout his life certain themes recur in the work of Chagall: the circus, lovers and peasants take their place beside more sombre scenes of suffering and death [...] For the themes in Chagall's art are timeless, not confined to a single epoch of history, but reminding man of the continuity of life for generation after generation, since the earliest days of recorded time" (S. Compton, Chagall, (exhibition catalogue) London, 1985, p. 14).