Ida Chagall (the artist's daughter)
Private Collection, Paris

Scène de village is an iconographical rendering of domestic life, the artist’s tranquil disposition, and the beauty that he found in his surroundings.  The work꧑ offers insight into his personal history by including Chagall’s favorite themes: his native village of Vitebsk represented in the foreground of the composition, an embracing couple, a disembodied character who is perhaps aཧ reference to the artist himself, and a floating bouquet which adds to the general sense of mysticism and allegory that characterized much of Chagall's best work.

The young lovers who appear in the dark green area of the composition are a s🎉ubject featured throughout Chagall's oeuvre.  They are among the most important and symbolic of the cast of characters that appear in his paintings. Sometimes they are the focal point of a composition, depicted on their wedding day, for example, and dressed in the finery of a young bride and groom; in other examples they appear as allegorical figures of love and devotion within the larger context of a landscape, as seen in the present work. Always laden with an air of mysticism, these pictures were often references to Chagall's own personal life and his relationship with his first wife, Bella, who died shortly after the Second World War. In the years that followed Bella's death, Chagall became even more devoted to this theme, as it preserved for him the memory of his late wife. The lovers of these pictures from the 1950s and 1960s are achingly passionate, often locked in a seamless embrace or twirling through space for all eternity.

Chagall painted this work at a time when he was enjoying much international success and recognition. He was finally settling into his own celebrity, and the pictures that he completed during this period are colored with the great sense of contentment that he felt during these later years of his life. Susan Compton writes about these later paintings that, "Above all, the oils of this period convey the artist's sheer enjoyment of painting. In his own works he may sum up the positive characteristic of this long period of active tranquility. 'Love of all the world is the most important thing, and liberty. When you love liberty, you love love' “(Susan Compton, Chagall (exhibition catalogue), Royal Ac♉ademy of Arts, London, 1985, p𝓡. 223).