Bouquet dans la nuit blends the genres of still life, landscape and self-portrait into a classic Chagall dreamscape. The affinity between painting and dreaming is a leitmotif in his work and the surreal elements are especially prominent here, from pairs of eyes on the walls of the left-hand house to the double appearance of the artist who is both seen behind his easel on the right and clasping his bride above. In the paintings of Surrealists from the 1930s and 1940s the theme of night provides a backdrop for unconscious fears, but for Chagall the opposite seems true. His idiom and palette are closer to that of Van Gogh’s
The Starry Night and if anything, his love of color becomes even more apparent in his in his night-time paintings
The startling bouquet in the foreground recalls the still lifes of Odilon Redon whose compositions exist in a comparable vacuum without reference to a table or perspective. Writing on the subject of flowers in Chagall’s work, Franz Meyer comments, "Many are simple still lifes with a bunch of red roses and white lilacs; in others, pairs of lovers and air-borne fiddlers gambol through space. The atmosphere encompasses and pervades the flowers like a magically light airy fluid, vibrant with their vitality" (Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1963, p. 369).