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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
The rooster features prominently in Chagall's personal mythology, its familiar, domesticated character looking back to the artist's rustic beginnings in Vitebsk: "the fowlyard...has its place in Chagall's recollections of his childhood. That is why poultry are always part of the Russian scenes painted during his first Paris period. In the twenties impressions of French farmyards and work on [La Fontaine's] Fables lend the motif a new topicality" (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1963, p. 381).
Chagall had previously identified with four-legged farm animals, such as the donkey or the goat. By the late 1920s, however, the rooster had assumed a dominant position in Chagall's bestiary. "As a symbol, the cock has an entirely different and far stranger nature than the quadrupeds, which, despite their four feet, are more closely related to man. For thousands of years it has played a part in religious rites as the embodiment of the forces of sun and fire. This symbolic meaning still lingers on in Chagall's work, where the cock represents elementary spiritual power" (ibid., pp. 380-381).
The rooster features prominently in Chagall's personal mythology, its familiar, domesticated character looking back to the artist's rustic beginnings in Vitebsk: "the fowlyard...has its place in Chagall's recollections of his childhood. That is why poultry are always part of the Russian scenes painted during his first Paris period. In the twenties impressions of French farmyards and work on [La Fontaine's] Fables lend the motif a new topicality" (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1963, p. 381).
Chagall had previously identified with four-legged farm animals, such as the donkey or the goat. By the late 1920s, however, the rooster had assumed a dominant position in Chagall's bestiary. "As a symbol, the cock has an entirely different and far stranger nature than the quadrupeds, which, despite their four feet, are more closely related to man. For thousands of years it has played a part in religious rites as the embodiment of the forces of sun and fire. This symbolic meaning still lingers on in Chagall's work, where the cock represents elementary spiritual power" (ibid., pp. 380-381).