In its title, Chagall’s 1968 Paysage d’Isba looks back to the artist’s earlier years, and in doing so brings together the many and varied influences that inspired him throughout his career. Like many of his most important late works, it celebrates the journey of his life from his rural upbringing in Vitebsk, to Paris and life in the South of France in a profusion of joyful imagery and colour.

Isba refers to the traditional wooden Russian dwellings that populated Vitebsk (now in Belarus) and which were a subject of Chagall’s art from the very beginning, usually signifying the artist’s own childhood home. It appears in a number of paintings from his time in Russia, both as the central motif, as in La maison bleue (fig. 1), and as part of a wider setting, but it took on a new significance in his work following his departure from Russia. The artist once described this house as ‘the little house near the Peskowatik road […] my Father sold it as soon as he was a little better off [...]. Looking down on this little house from my newfound “stature” I winced and asked myself, “How could I possibly have been born there? How can one breathe in such a hole?”’ (quoted in S. Compton, Marc Chagall. My Life – My Dream, Munich, 1990, p. 198). Yet despite this, the ‘little house’ was evidently an important part of the artist’s earliest memories, and repeatedly featured in his nostalgic paintings of Vitebsk and was invariably painted in vibrant tones which distinguished it from the rest of the town.

In the present work it forms the glorious centrepiece of the composition, from which the other motifs abound. It captures almost exactly a sentiment that Chagall expressed in 1933 when he was asked to describe the important meetings of his life: ‘When I opened my eyes for the first time in my life I met a whole world, the town, the house, which little by little became fixed in me for always. Later I met a woman’ (quoted in ibid., p. 11).

The woman in question was his childhood love and first wife Bella who appears here as the other dominant presence. Chagall met Bella Rosenfeld shortly before his first departure from Russia in 1910 and from that moment onwards she was a constant presence in his life, remaining a profound influence even after her death in 1944 and appearing in some of his most celebrated works. As Franz Meyer writes: ‘Always present - watching, advising, refining - she supplied echo and answers to artistic questions, formed contacts, removed obstacles. She was and still is the archetype of the loved one, the bride who leans toward her young groom in so many pictures, the tender girl who dreams in her lover’s arms’ (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall: Life and Work, New York, 1961, pp. 465-466). From the very first, images of her as the universal beloved were associated with depictions that recall Vitebsk and both would become symbolic figures that recalled the early years of the artist’s experience. In Paysage d’Isba her presence evokes the sense of nostalgia which characterises much of Chagall’s later work and her gesture here – suggesting that she might be expecting a child – reinforces that emotion.

These two central elements of the Paysage d’Isba are surrounded by many of the other figures that populate Chagall’s beguiling dreamworlds, from the figure who represents the artist himself and the cockerel that suggests the artist’s alter-ego to the circus performer and the donkey. Each of these figures had a specific symbolic resonance for the artist and in combining them he draws on different aspects of his past. Their individual characters are emphasised by Chagall’s use of colour; throughout the 1960s he had occupied himself with stained glass commissions for the windows of the Haddassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, the United Nations in New York (fig. 4) and the Fraumünster Cathedral in Zurich, and the aesthetic of this fragile medium and its translucency had a profound impact on his painting. As the artist stated upon returning to France a decade before he painted Paysage d’Isba: ‘Upon my return to France, at the end of the war, I had the vision of glowing colours, not decorative and screaming ones […]. Now I feel the presence of a colour which is the colour of love’ (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, Chagall. A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 181).