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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
"For me, you are—my life," Chagall wrote encouragingly to his young paramour, Virginia Haggard McNeil, three days after their son David was born in 1946. "I can't live anymore without you. Fate wanted me to meet you after dear Bella (whom you love too)" (quoted in B. Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative, Stanford, 2004, p. 588). Writing from Paris, Chagall had timed his first return to Europe after the war purposefully to be absent at the birth of his son, the undeniable proof of a relationship he was not yet prepared to admit. Virginia, the Paris-born cosmopolitan daughter of a British diplomat, had entered his life in 1945 as his housekeeper, rebellious in youth and unhappy in her marriage. Each of them had felt "starved," as Virginia later recalled, but they found new love together, unexpectedly for Chagall only nine months after the death of his beloved wife, Bella (ibid., p. 565). The pleasant reality of daily domestic intimacy, however, could never upstage the power of the mythic eternal moment that Chagall had created around the memory of Bella, nor diminish the intensity of imagery for which she remained the principal source. Nevertheless, "in his imagination," Benjamin Harshav has explained, "Chagall conflated the two images of Virginia and Bella, the sensual and the spiritual" (ibid., p. 567).
"There can be no question," Sidney Alexander has written, "that black-haired Bella was subtly becoming metamorphosed into taller, longer-necked, russet-haired Virginia" (Marc Chagal: A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 388). As years passed following Bella’s death, her specter made only occasional, ectoplasmic appearances in Chagall’s paintings, almost always in bridal veil. Chagall's brides were, according to Virginia, "always Bella," but the nudes were generally Virginia (ibid., p. 386). In the present work, we see what is likely Virginia draped across the composition linking several distinct elements in Chagall’s personal iconography: the rooftops of his childhood home of Vitebsk along the lower edge, the rooster and goat that often appear in place of the artist, topped off by the violin-playing fish. The scene is rounded out with what appears to be spectators at a circus, another subject that would feature repeatedly throughout his oeuvre. But instead of watching acrobats or clowns, they are onlookers to Chagall’s history.
"For me, you are—my life," Chagall wrote encouragingly to his young paramour, Virginia Haggard McNeil, three days after their son David was born in 1946. "I can't live anymore without you. Fate wanted me to meet you after dear Bella (whom you love too)" (quoted in B. Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative, Stanford, 2004, p. 588). Writing from Paris, Chagall had timed his first return to Europe after the war purposefully to be absent at the birth of his son, the undeniable proof of a relationship he was not yet prepared to admit. Virginia, the Paris-born cosmopolitan daughter of a British diplomat, had entered his life in 1945 as his housekeeper, rebellious in youth and unhappy in her marriage. Each of them had felt "starved," as Virginia later recalled, but they found new love together, unexpectedly for Chagall only nine months after the death of his beloved wife, Bella (ibid., p. 565). The pleasant reality of daily domestic intimacy, however, could never upstage the power of the mythic eternal moment that Chagall had created around the memory of Bella, nor diminish the intensity of imagery for which she remained the principal source. Nevertheless, "in his imagination," Benjamin Harshav has explained, "Chagall conflated the two images of Virginia and Bella, the sensual and the spiritual" (ibid., p. 567).
"There can be no question," Sidney Alexander has written, "that black-haired Bella was subtly becoming metamorphosed into taller, longer-necked, russet-haired Virginia" (Marc Chagal: A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 388). As years passed following Bella’s death, her specter made only occasional, ectoplasmic appearances in Chagall’s paintings, almost always in bridal veil. Chagall's brides were, according to Virginia, "always Bella," but the nudes were generally Virginia (ibid., p. 386). In the present work, we see what is likely Virginia draped across the composition linking several distinct elements in Chagall’s personal iconography: the rooftops of his childhood home of Vitebsk along the lower edge, the rooster and goat that often appear in place of the artist, topped off by the violin-playing fish. The scene is rounded out with what appears to be spectators at a circus, another subject that would feature repeatedly throughout his oeuvre. But instead of watching acrobats or clowns, they are onlookers to Chagall’s history.