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Lot Essay
The comité Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Filled with a heady sense of romance, magic and poignant personal history, Marc Chagall’s Étude pour la Nuit de Vence presents the quintessential themes and motifs of the artist’s long and prolific career. A nocturnal scene depicting the picturesque town of Vence, Chagall’s home in the south of France, it is filled with an array of floating figures and animals. An rooster presides over the night sky, hovering above the deep blue moon-lit roofs. The rooster is accompanied by a violinist, whose melodious music drifts throughout this fantastical vision, and by a goat, all of which serve as resonant symbols of the Chagall’s early life in Vitebsk. On the lower right of the landscape, a couple are locked in an embrace, illuminated by the iridescent moon that casts a vivid red light throughout the sky. Just above this couple, a vase filled with a bouquet of flowers – a joyously life-affirming motif that was prolific in the artist’s work at this time – its blooms rendered with thickly applied strokes of deep purple. Dedicated to the artist’s second wife, Valentina ‘Vava’ Brodsky, this love-filled painting remained in Chagall’s collection for the rest of his life before passing to his daughter, Ida.
Étude pour la Nuit de Vence was painted in 1953, three years after Chagall moved to Vence. It was not until Chagall moved to the south of France that he once again began to feel settled and at ease. The artist bought a house called ‘Les Collines’, which would remain his home for sixteen years, longer than he had lived anywhere else throughout his life, and he was joined there two years later by Vava. Chagall experienced a period of great happiness and contentment, describing his life in Vence as, ‘a bouquet of roses’ (Chagall, quoted in, S. Alexander, Marc Chagall: A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 492).
Under the brilliant light of the Côte d’Azur and once more blissfully in love, Chagall’s painting became increasingly imbued with radiant and intense colour. In Étude pour la Nuit de Vence, the composition is suffused with rich hues of azure blue, emerald green and flaming scarlet. As Franz Meyer, Chagall’s biographer and son-in-law has written: ‘Chagall’s new sojourn in the south exerted a decisive influence on his art. The light, the vegetation, the rhythm of life, all contributed to the rise of a more relaxed, airy, sensuous style in which the magic of the colour dominates…’ (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, Life and Work, London, 1964, p. 519).
Though immersed in his new life in France, Chagall’s Russian heritage remained a constant feature of his art. The rooster and the violinist that appear in Étude pour la Nuit de Vence are among the artist’s most recurrent motifs, references to Chagall’s rural upbringing in the Russian town of Vitebsk, as well as to his Jewish heritage. From nostalgia and love, to music and colour, it is in this way that every aspect of Chagall’s art is infused with a deeply poignant and personal meaning; as he once stated: ‘It is my whole life that is identified with my work’ (Chagall, quoted in J. Wullschlager, Chagall Love and Exile, London, 2008, p. 333).
Filled with a heady sense of romance, magic and poignant personal history, Marc Chagall’s Étude pour la Nuit de Vence presents the quintessential themes and motifs of the artist’s long and prolific career. A nocturnal scene depicting the picturesque town of Vence, Chagall’s home in the south of France, it is filled with an array of floating figures and animals. An rooster presides over the night sky, hovering above the deep blue moon-lit roofs. The rooster is accompanied by a violinist, whose melodious music drifts throughout this fantastical vision, and by a goat, all of which serve as resonant symbols of the Chagall’s early life in Vitebsk. On the lower right of the landscape, a couple are locked in an embrace, illuminated by the iridescent moon that casts a vivid red light throughout the sky. Just above this couple, a vase filled with a bouquet of flowers – a joyously life-affirming motif that was prolific in the artist’s work at this time – its blooms rendered with thickly applied strokes of deep purple. Dedicated to the artist’s second wife, Valentina ‘Vava’ Brodsky, this love-filled painting remained in Chagall’s collection for the rest of his life before passing to his daughter, Ida.
Étude pour la Nuit de Vence was painted in 1953, three years after Chagall moved to Vence. It was not until Chagall moved to the south of France that he once again began to feel settled and at ease. The artist bought a house called ‘Les Collines’, which would remain his home for sixteen years, longer than he had lived anywhere else throughout his life, and he was joined there two years later by Vava. Chagall experienced a period of great happiness and contentment, describing his life in Vence as, ‘a bouquet of roses’ (Chagall, quoted in, S. Alexander, Marc Chagall: A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 492).
Under the brilliant light of the Côte d’Azur and once more blissfully in love, Chagall’s painting became increasingly imbued with radiant and intense colour. In Étude pour la Nuit de Vence, the composition is suffused with rich hues of azure blue, emerald green and flaming scarlet. As Franz Meyer, Chagall’s biographer and son-in-law has written: ‘Chagall’s new sojourn in the south exerted a decisive influence on his art. The light, the vegetation, the rhythm of life, all contributed to the rise of a more relaxed, airy, sensuous style in which the magic of the colour dominates…’ (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, Life and Work, London, 1964, p. 519).
Though immersed in his new life in France, Chagall’s Russian heritage remained a constant feature of his art. The rooster and the violinist that appear in Étude pour la Nuit de Vence are among the artist’s most recurrent motifs, references to Chagall’s rural upbringing in the Russian town of Vitebsk, as well as to his Jewish heritage. From nostalgia and love, to music and colour, it is in this way that every aspect of Chagall’s art is infused with a deeply poignant and personal meaning; as he once stated: ‘It is my whole life that is identified with my work’ (Chagall, quoted in J. Wullschlager, Chagall Love and Exile, London, 2008, p. 333).