“I can freely say today that I owe all I have succeeded in achieving to Paris, to France, of which the air, the men, nature were for me the true school of my life and of my art.”
- Marc Chagall in an interview with James Johnson Sweeney in 1946
France, and particularly the city of Paris, was an important source of inspiration for Chagall and the motif of the Eiffel Tower recurred throughout his career. Chagall explained that “I arrived in Paris as though driven by fate. Words coming from my heart flowed to my mouth. They almost choked me. I kept stammering. The words crowded outward, anxious to be illuminated by this Paris light, to adorn themselves with it. I arrived with the thoughts, the dreams, that one can only have at the age of twenty” (quoted in Jacob Baal-Teshuva (ed.), Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 74).
