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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall have confirmed the authenticity of this painting.
The central characters in many of Chagall's paintings are lovers or newlyweds caught up in the early excitement of passion, who have abandoned themselves to love, and have completely surrendered themselves unto each other. For Chagall and his first wife Bella, who met in Chagall’s home town of Vitebsk in Belarus before marrying in 1915 and living together for almost three decades, this experience of love took a shared intensity that appeared to never falter or fade. Bella's death in 1944 from a viral infection remained, for Chagall, a casualty of the War and his adoration for Bella grew even greater as he continued to celebrate her impact on his life in many paintings.
Chagall remarried in 1952, after a courtship that lasted only a few months. He once again found happiness and an eruption in creative energy with his new life in the South of France where he settled with his new wife Vava from 1950. The pleasant reality of daily domestic intimacy, however, coexisted with the mythical eternal moment that Chagall had created around the memory of Bella. Sidney Alexander has written: "Even after her death (when he was living with Virginia) whenever he painted a bride it was Bella; whenever he painted a bridal veil it referred to Bella" (in Marc Chagall, A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 82).
In Couple au violon et bouquet, completed over thirty years after Bella's death, Chagall and his beloved, unmarked by death or the passing of time, float by the light of the moon, in the streets of his home town of Vitebsk to the sound of a violin, flanked by familiar farm animals of his youth. The bursting bouquet is the only symbol representing the artist’s new life in Provence. The bursting flora of the bouquet became an increasingly pertinent motif for the artist, linked not only to abundant love and fecundity, but also to France. Here we see depicted in vibrant and passionate colour the all-consuming reverie of this folie a deux, living on within the artist’s mind. A dreamscape, with the moon as the only source of light, it presents a surreal reminiscence, combining the past and the present together in the artist’s inner world, preserving his love eternally.
The central characters in many of Chagall's paintings are lovers or newlyweds caught up in the early excitement of passion, who have abandoned themselves to love, and have completely surrendered themselves unto each other. For Chagall and his first wife Bella, who met in Chagall’s home town of Vitebsk in Belarus before marrying in 1915 and living together for almost three decades, this experience of love took a shared intensity that appeared to never falter or fade. Bella's death in 1944 from a viral infection remained, for Chagall, a casualty of the War and his adoration for Bella grew even greater as he continued to celebrate her impact on his life in many paintings.
Chagall remarried in 1952, after a courtship that lasted only a few months. He once again found happiness and an eruption in creative energy with his new life in the South of France where he settled with his new wife Vava from 1950. The pleasant reality of daily domestic intimacy, however, coexisted with the mythical eternal moment that Chagall had created around the memory of Bella. Sidney Alexander has written: "Even after her death (when he was living with Virginia) whenever he painted a bride it was Bella; whenever he painted a bridal veil it referred to Bella" (in Marc Chagall, A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 82).
In Couple au violon et bouquet, completed over thirty years after Bella's death, Chagall and his beloved, unmarked by death or the passing of time, float by the light of the moon, in the streets of his home town of Vitebsk to the sound of a violin, flanked by familiar farm animals of his youth. The bursting bouquet is the only symbol representing the artist’s new life in Provence. The bursting flora of the bouquet became an increasingly pertinent motif for the artist, linked not only to abundant love and fecundity, but also to France. Here we see depicted in vibrant and passionate colour the all-consuming reverie of this folie a deux, living on within the artist’s mind. A dreamscape, with the moon as the only source of light, it presents a surreal reminiscence, combining the past and the present together in the artist’s inner world, preserving his love eternally.