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Lot Essay
“Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible,” Chagall stated in his address delivered at the inauguration on 7 July 1973–his 86th birthday–of the Musée national message biblique Marc Chagall in Nice. “It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time. Ever since then, I have searched for its reflection in life and in Art. The Bible is like an echo of nature and this is the secret I have tried to convey” (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 295).
Chagall typically featured, from his earliest work onward, subjects drawn from the Jewish culture and folklore in which he was raised in his native Russian town of Vitebsk. He did not directly treat biblical themes, however, until 1930, when his dealer Ambroise Vollard, who was also a devotee and publisher of illustrated books, commissioned him to create a series of etchings for a Bible edition. Even while continuing to work on two other books for Vollard, La Fontaine’s Fables and Gogol’s Dead Souls, Chagall began to paint gouaches of biblical stories to prepare for this new project (Meyer, nos. 585-601). “I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it,” he explained in the early 1960s to son-in-law, Franz Meyer (quoted in F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1964, p. 384).
Chagall typically featured, from his earliest work onward, subjects drawn from the Jewish culture and folklore in which he was raised in his native Russian town of Vitebsk. He did not directly treat biblical themes, however, until 1930, when his dealer Ambroise Vollard, who was also a devotee and publisher of illustrated books, commissioned him to create a series of etchings for a Bible edition. Even while continuing to work on two other books for Vollard, La Fontaine’s Fables and Gogol’s Dead Souls, Chagall began to paint gouaches of biblical stories to prepare for this new project (Meyer, nos. 585-601). “I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it,” he explained in the early 1960s to son-in-law, Franz Meyer (quoted in F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1964, p. 384).