Marc Chagall

Jean Planque, Switzerland
Stephen Hahn, New York
Sotheby's, London, 1 July 1964, Lot 96
Marlborough Gerson Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by 1968

Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art & Kyoto, Municipal Museum, Marc Chagall, 1963, no. 3, illustrated 
Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art & London, Royal Academy of Arts, Chagall, 1984-85, no. 7, illustrated in color 
Tokyo, The Tokyo Shimbun; Kasama Nichido Museum of Art & Nagoya, Nagoya City Art Museum, Marc Chagall, 1989-90, no. 6
San Francisco, The Jewish Community Museum, I and the Village: The Early Works of Marc Chagall, 1988, no. 2, illustrated in color (dated circa 1909-11)
The Utsunomiya City Museum; Mie Prefectural Museum of Art & Chiba City Museum of Art, Marc Chagall, 2007, no. 6, illustrated in color 
Roslyn, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Marc Chagall, 2012, n.n. 

Martha Schwendener, "Vibrant Postcards from an Inner World, A Review of 'Marc Chagall,' at the Nassau County Museum of Art" in The New York Times, August 10, 2012, p. L11, illustrated in color

Painted in 1908, Portrait de la soeur de l’artiste is an incredibly rare example of Marc Chagall's early work. The subject of this portrait is one of the artist's sisters, his most frequent models during this period. Chagall was born in Vitebsk in 1887, the eldest of seven children. In the late nineteenth century "A thriving port, Vitebsk had rail facilities, a growing industrial base, and some impressive cathedrals and commercial structures. But it was, on the whole, a provincial town. The majority of its dwellings were rude timber structures. The goats, chickens, and cows that would later fill Chagall's paintings roamed through backyards and along the unpaved streets. Chagall affectionately recalled that his relatives and neighbors would climb the pitched roofs of the low houses to view events in the town or simply to gaze at the heavens" (A. Kagan, Marc Chagall, New York, 1989, p. 11). 

Two years before the present work was painted, Chagall began his studies as an art student under Jehuda Pen, who was well established in Vitebsk. "Although Chagall recalled his first teacher with great affection, he also recalled that, upon his entry into Pen’s studio and his first encounter with this local masters works, he had ‘already decided that I’ll never paint like that.’ Chagall knew that, for himself, ‘the essential thing in art, painting, a painting different from the painting everyone else does.’ He soon became notable among Pen’s students and the only one who painted with violet” (ibid., p. 12). Although stylistically Pen would not prove highly influential to the young artist's work, the environment of his studio gave Chagall a creative space to explore as well as access to a network of other young people from his hometown with similar interests. One of these colleagues, Victor Mekler, persuaded Chagall to travel to Saint Petersburg in the winter of 1907 where he would enroll in art school and significantly broaden his world view. Over the course of the next several years Chagall would travel frequently back and forth between Vitebsk and his new life in Saint Petersburg.

Portrait de la soeur de l’artiste relates closely to a series of family portraits painted from 1907-10, and in particular My Sister Manya, from 1909, where objects and sitters are brought close together in the composition to convey an immediacy of perception. With its strong, bold lines and traditional Russian motifs, Portrait de la soeur de l’artiste should be appreciated context of the Jack of Diamonds group, and in particular, the neo-primitivist movement pioneered by Natalia Goncharova and Ilya Mashkov, who consciously reverted to Russia's folk art in order to create a genuine and direct mode of representation. This would have no doubt struck a chord with the young Chagall, whose compositions drew heavily on the visual and aural traditions surrounding his Hassidic Jewish upbringing. Writing about the present work Jeannene M. Pryblyski states that “While the particular identity of this sister remains unnamed, a sense of intimacy with his subject is implied in the unpretentious domesticity of the scene. This refined quality of elegance, discovered in simplicity, lends the portrait its extraordinary power" (I and the Village: Early Works by Marc Chagall, Op. cit., p. 14).