Laing Galleries, Toronto
Acquired from the above before 1961

Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, Life and Work, New York, 1961, no. 331, illustrated n.p.

Executed on cream wove paper laid down on card. There is a faint 1 cm mat stain along the top and side edges as well as some small repairs at top corners and another small area of losses at the extreme upper right edge. The sheet is visible in places and is somewhat time darkened wit ha few scattered pindot fox marks most notably in the figure's right leg. There are a few scattered losses to the gouache, a dew which appear to have been in-painted but these are limited to the background. Overall the work is in good condition.
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Employing a Cubist aesthetic typical of his work of the later 1910s and early 1920s, Chagall delicately crafts a fantastical dreamscape in L'Homme sur le toit. The scene features imagery evocative of so many of his works from this period, including the paradoxical flying peasant figure (not unrelated to the green-clad Rabbi of Jour de fête (Le Rabbin au citron); see fig. 1), here depicted on a rooftop like some of Chagall's somnambulists of a decade prior, not to mention the characteristic wooden architecture of Vitebsk, the village where the artist was born and where he is understood to have executed the present work. Chagall had planned his return to Vitebsk in 1914 to be brief, but political circumstances prohibited his return to Paris until 1922. In June 1914 Chagall traveled to Berlin to attend the opening of his first one-man show consisting of 40 oils and 160 gouaches at Herwarth Walden's Galerie der Sturm. Later that month he returned to Vitebsk to attend his sister's wedding. It had been his intention to stay for three months before returning to Paris, but the outbreak of World War I made this impossible and he remained in Russia for the next eight years. After experiencing the excitement of Paris and Berlin, the provincial atmosphere of Vitebsk depressed him at first, but he soon found that the rich cultural and religious life of his birthplace offered a remarkable range of subject matter for him to explore.  As Jean-Michel Foray writes, "No other artist in the Parisian avant-garde of the early twentieth century explicitly depicted scenes from the Torah or Genesis vis-a-vis the cubist formal principles of fragmentation and deconstruction... To put it another way, at the precise moment when the avant-garde was moving away from figuration, narrative compositions, and genre painting in favor of formalism and abstraction, Chagall reintroduced traditional themes and religious subject matter. This decision, though defining for Chagall, represented the beginning of a deep rift between the artist and the avant-garde" (Jean-Michel Foray, Marc Chagall (exhibition catalogue), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2003, p. 64).



The authenticity of this work has kindly been confirmed by the Comité Chagall.