Private Collection, Geneva
William A. Findlay, Chicago
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Le Bouquet d’Amour contains highly recognizable and beloved themes that repeatedly populated both the artist’s imagination and his paintings. 🐓; Flowers, which dominate the foreground, fascinated Chagall from the late 1920’s onward.  The artist was first struck by the charm of flowers in Toulon in 1924; he later claimed that he had not known of flowers in Russia and they therefore came to represent France for him.  The effervescent bursts of color in the bouquet add a note of levity to a predominantly blue nocturnal composition.  Life, growth and the cyclical nature of existence are emphasized by their presence in the primary picture plane.

Young lovers are also frequently featured throughout Chagall’s oeuvre, and comprise among the most important and symbolic of the cast of characters rendered in his paintings.  Enveloped in their own world, they belong to neither the genre scene in the foreground nor the landscape behind.  Yet their seminal role within the framework of the pictorial narrative is underscored by their stra𝓀tegic placement as the physical and thematic underpinning of the composition. 

The small village of Vitebsk, the artist’s birthplace in Russia, provided inspiration for the humble cluster of rooftops set serenely beneath the ominous crimson moon.  Through its lyrical use of color and spatial trickery, Le Bouquet d’Amour highlights Chagall’s ability to successfully integrate a varied range of pictorial elements in a single frame to realize a harmonious composition.