(Witebsk 1887–1985 Saint-Paul-de-Vence)
Les Paysans, 1964, signed Marc Chagall, gouache, watercolour, ink wash and brush and ink on paper, 62.2 x 48.2 cm, framed
The authenticity of this work has been kindly confirmed by the Comité Chagall, Paris.

Provenance:
Galerie Maeght, Paris
acquired in Israel after 1964

Exhibited:
Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1996, n. n. ill.

Literature:
IFAR Journal, vol. 10, no. 3/4, 2008–09, ill. p. 59

Chagall doesn’t carve things up, he carves up his memories.

“My pictures” – he says –
“are painted ensembles of inner images that own me.”

“As in a magical kaleidoscope, the individual inner images come together and function in the pictorial context like individual, object-determining nouns evoking long chains of memory. A naively outlined avenue of Russian houses and domed churches stands for the poetic background of Vitebsk; a maid, a cow or a farmer evoke rural life; a Jew with a sackcloth and ritual signs and scenes echo Jewish legends; zodiac signs and abstract constellations of space evoke the cosmic. The poetic sentence is composed of such indicative ‘nouns’.”

in: Werner Haftmann, Marc Chagall, Cologne: DuMont, 1988, page 18.

“The stars were my best friends. The air was full of legends and phantoms, full of mythical and fairy-tale creatures, which suddenly flew away over the roof, so that one was at one with the firmament.”
Marc Chagall

Chagall’s experience of rural living and impressions of ordinary life in his Russian homeland were important sources of inspiration throughout his career.

In this work we find him sketching a nocturnal landscape with a peasant woman cradling a little goat in her arms rendered in black ink and sparse colour accents. He expands the background of village huts in the upper part of the picture to include free-floating portraits and figures that evoke a space of memory and imagination – a hallmark of his compositions.

One particularly charming touch is his variation of the round, protective posture of the peasant woman in the mother-child figure above. Chagall’s little inventions on the margins and ambiguous storylines create a kind of opening in the painting, a place for the strange and wonderful to erupt in everyday life.