MARC CHAGALL

Georges Lurcy, London
O'Hana Gallery, London
Private Collection, Trieste
Private Collection (acquired from the above in the late 1990s and sold: Christie's, London, June 22, 2006, lot 441)
Acquired at the above sale 

London, O'Hana Gallery, Exhibition of Painting of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 1960
London, O'Hana Gallery, Exhibition of Oils, Gouaches, Watercolors, Lithographs by Marc Chagall, 1961, no. 9

Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, Life and Work, New York, 1961, no. 520, illustrated

Excellent condition. Executed on wove paper laid down on board. Sheet is slightly time-darkened. There are 2 small crease-marks at extreme lower right corner. The extreme top left corner is slightly darkened and abraded due to a previous window mat. There is also near the bottom edge, to the left of the signature, an abrasion and stain probably due to a previous window mat as well. The colors are bright and fresh.
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Chagall painted the current composition while traveling with his family through the region of Savoie in the French Alps.  In 1924, the artist had moved to Paris and found a studio on the Avenue d'Orleans and by the end of that decade he was recognized as a prominent figure of the Ecole de Paris. He spent much of these years exploring different areas of France -- Savoie, Auvergne, the Pyrenees and the Riviera. James Johnson Sweeney writes of this time for the artist, "Through all this period one feels a happiness, a joy of living in his work. Animals, lovers, flowers, his series of circus gouaches; or vacation landscapes... Now, there was none of that longing of his first Paris years for something beyond reach, or that melancholy and inquietude of his Russian paintings. Instead each new picture seemed to exude a warmer sentimental glow, as much a product of the technique of which he was gaining constantly a fuller mastery as of his subject matter" (James Johnson Sweeney, Marc Chagall (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1969, p. 58). 

 

In Dans les Alpes (Savoie), Chagall finds this sense of tranquility in the wintery landscape surrounding a small church in Savoie. Although he clearly delineates the landscape and figures therein, there is an essence of the abstracted and fantastical dreamscapes that will begin to dominate his work a few years later. Painted during a decade which gave rise to some of his most significant paintings, the present work is singular and notable within Chagall's ouevre.