Marc Chagall

Private Collection, Paris
Private Collection, Chicago
Acquired by the present owner in New York in 1972

Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall: Life and Work, New York, 1961, no. 146, illustrated n.p.

Executed on cream wove paper. Sheet is affixed to a sheet of card at several places around perimeter. Card and backing board have windows cut to shot inscription on verso. Sheet is undulating slightly due to heavy medium. Extreme upper right and lower left corners of sheet have been cut. There are a few very thin cracks in some of the thickest areas of pigment, as well as two small pigment losses in very thick areas near the center of the bottom half of the sheet and one near the upper right corner. The colors in this work are extremely bright and fresh and the piece is in very good condition.
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Following his studies in St. Petersburg, the young Chagall won a scholarship to Paris in 1910 and soon moved to La Ruche, one of the city’s most extraordinary Cités d’Artistes. Situated behind the abattoirsof Paris, this twelve-sided building with its hidden garden housed 140 studios, each filled with young painters, sculptors, poets and bohemians from all over the world. His time there was to prove a seminal experience in Chagall's artistic development, for it brought him into contact with luminaries such as Léger, Laurens, Soutine and Modigliani, as well as their wider circle of acquaintances, including the poets Blaise Cendrars, Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire.

This artistic commune had a major impact on Chagall’s work. Not only did the poets, the Fauves and the Cubists he met at La Ruche influence his work, but the cosmopolitan atmosphere of this art shelter inspired him. Yet it appears the bohemian lifestyle did not prove conducive to a good night's sleep—later in life Chagall described these restless nights in the commune: "While an offended model sobbed in the Russian ateliers, the Italian studios rang with songs and the sound of guitars, the Jewish ones with discussions, I was alone in my studio in front of my oil lamp. A studio crammed with pictures, with canvases that were not really canvases, but my tablecloths, sheets, and nightshirts torn into pieces. Two or three o’clock in the morning. The sky is blue. Dawn is breaking. Down there, a little way off, they slaughtered cattle, cows bellowed, and I painted them. I used to sit up like that all night long" (quoted in: Marc Chagall. The Russian Years 1906-1922 (exhibition catalogue), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 1991). The present work, Le Somnambuliste (The Sleepwalker), provides a record of this period of the artist’s life, and the deep blues of the dawn sky and eerie moonlight brilliantly evoke these sleepless vigils.