Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York

Sale: Christie's, New York, May 16, 1984, lot 65

Chalk and Vermillion Gallery, New York

Perls Gallery, New York (acquired from the above)

Private Col🔜lection (acquired from the above on November 11, 1985 and sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 5, 2003, lot 33)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Marc Chagall, Recent Paintings, 1966-1968, 1968, no. 11

The canvas is unlined and there is no evidence of retouching under UV light. The original rich impasto is well preserved. Apart from some very minor stable hairlines of craquelure in the upper section, this work is in very good original condition. Colors: The stems of the flowers are greener and not as blue as they appear in the catalogue illustration.
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The present work, completed between 1959 and 1967 while Chagall was living in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, depicts several of his favorite motifs: the distant village, the rooster, and a lavish bouquet of flowers. Inspired by his appreciation of the beauty of southern France, flowers were especially prevalent in the artist's compositions of this era. According to his biographer Franz Meyer, "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 colour dominates more and more with the passing years. At Vence he witnessed the daily miracle of growth and blossoming in the mild, strong, all-pervading light - an experience in which earth and matter had their place" (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, London, 1964, p. 519).

 

For his palette, Chagall chose a brilliant cobalt blue, a color which signified the heavens and gave a mystical tone to his picture. In the right marg൲in of the composition are two male figures - the larger one is perhaps a self-portrait of the artist wearing his recognizable peasant's cap. The floating female figure in red in the upper right-quadrant is most likely a reference to the artist's late wife Bella, whose ethereal image was frequently depicted in the artist's canvases after her death in 1944.

 

After completing this picture in 1967, Chagall sent it to his dealer Pierre Matisse in New York, and it was featured the next year in an exhibition of Chagall's recent works at Matisse's 57th Street gallery. In the exhibition catalogue, Matisse wrote of his impressions of this painting: "It had begun in 1959, and the upper area is filled with the traditional scene that Chagall has always carried about with him: the cock striding through the night sky over the city - Vitebsk by the light of the moon - and on the other side the airborne apparition of a rosy girl, while behind the huge white flowering bush that fills most of the canvas there is barely room on the ground for the midnight blue figure of a young man, his hand on his heart. What is there in it that makes me link those still-lifes to this poem of Belorussia? No doubt the great flowering shrub that pervades it. But also because this canvas, unfinished since 1959, seems to have found its resolution in 1967 - that is to say at Saint-Paul..." (P. Matisse, Marc Chagall, Recent Paintings, 1966-1968, (ex. cat.), Pierre 𝓰🐼Matisse Gallery, New York, 1968).