The two great influences on Marc Chagall’s work were undoubtedly Bella, his first wife with whom he fell passionately in love upon their first meeting in 1909, and Paris, his adopted city where he left an enduring legacy on the landscape of Modern art. Completed decades after Bella’s death and at a time when Chagall enjoyed international fame as a painter, Le Songe is replete with symbols that pay homage to both the lover and the city through the artist’s iconic dreamscape style. Its dominant blue and red hues imbue the work with an overwhelming sense of yearning, the lovers float alongside the Eiffel Tower and other recognizable symbols from Chagall's oeuvre. In contrast to Chagall’s more boldly colored and exuberant works from this period, one cannot help but feel the artist’s nostalgia for a bygone era of his life.

Chagall first arrived in France in the summer of 1910 at the age of 23. Within his first two days in Paris, he visited the Salon des Indépendants and there he saw the work of a panoply of contemporary artists, including the Fauves and the Cubists. Paintings by Derain, Léger, Matisse and Picasso hung alongside the vibrant Orphist canvases of Robert Delaunay, who was to become the mentor of Paul Klee, August Macke and Chagall himself. Very soon he had moved into lodgings in the legendary block of studios known as La Rûche on the rue Vaugirard in Montparnasse, a building famed for its lively bohemian atmosphere and cosmopolitan inhabitants. Chagall lodged in the room next to Modigliani; Soutine also lived in the building during this time. The poets Apollinaire, Cendrars and Canudo frequently visited. In this milieu of spontaneity and rich cultural exchange, Chagall began his first period of painting in Paris which he would return to with clear nostalgia in his later years.