Marc Chagall

Estate of the artist
Private Collection, USA

Executed on white laid paper, attached to the mount along all four edges. There are artist's pinholes at intervals along all four edges. This work is in very good condition. Colours: The paper tone is slightly warmer, the greens more vivid and the reds slighly yellower in the original.
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The multitude of subjects in La Vision du Peintre of 1980 is typical of Chagall's later compositions. The work is a compendium of the various motifs and folkloric themes that populated the painter's imagination, and contains several of the most important elements of Chagall's pictorial iconography, set against a backdrop that recalls the village of Vitebsk that was so often the scene of Chagall's reveries. Each figure is masterfully rendered through a matrix of colour and spatial experimentation that epitomised Chagall's work, and together 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).