Marc Chagall

Galerie Rosengart, Lucerne (acquired from the artist in the late 1960s)
Private Collection, USA (acquired in 1969)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, 19th June 2006, lot 53
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

La Nuit enchantée of 1964 is a quintessential example of Chagall's mastery in assembling an array of folkloric images in a dense and colourful composition. This work contains several of the most important elements of his pictorial iconography; the bride, the clown-musician, the goat, the bouquet of flowers and the rooster. Each figure is masterfully rendered through a matrix of intense colour and spatial experimentation that epitomised Chagall's work, reflecting 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), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1985, p. 14).

Love and marriage, a recurring theme throughout Chagall's work, was also an integral part of the artist's life. Chagall's own love story began in 1909, when he met Bella Rosenfeld, the daughter of a wealthy Vitebsk merchant family. It was love at first sight for the artist, who eventually married the young woman who would serve as inspiration for his art for years to follow. 'Always present - watching, advising, refining - she [Bella] 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' (Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, Life and Work, New York, 1963, p. 465-466).