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1887-1985
PAYSAGE À L'ISBA

measurements
73 by 54cm.

alternate measurements
28 3/4 by 21 1/4 in.

Painted in 1968.

signed Marc Chagall (lower left); signed Marc Chagall on the reverse

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Galerie Maeght, Paris
Sale: Sotheby's, London, 6th December 1978, lot 251
Purchased at the above sale by the family of the present owner

EXHIBITED

Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art (and travelling in Japan), Marc Chagall, 1976, no. 29, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

NOTE

Paysage à l'Isba of 1968 conveys vividly Chagall's imaginative approach to composition and enjoyment of painting during this period. It portrays a remarkable scene of activity in a topsy-turvy village, dominated by Isbas - Russian wooden huts from the artist's native Vitebsk, stacked on top of each other in a riot of colours. The canvas is divided into two halves -- on the right are various recurring motives of Chagall's imagery: the bride, the donkey's head, the artist and the cockerel, and a tower of Isbas, some of them catapulted into mid-air, giving the scene a joyful character and a sense of vibrancy. Echoes of the Tower of Babel and Jacob's Ladder are present and this scene harks back to his childhood memories of Vitebsk. The left side of the canvas is dominated by a tree, a symbol of growth and fertility.

It is no coincidence that this work was painted during the same period as Chagall's experimentation with stained glass. This new medium brought around an increasing freedom in his use of colour and these experiments bore fruit in the new intensity in his paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s. 'Stained glass has allowed Chagall full rein for his pleasure in colour. His first experience of the special property of colour in this medium was as early as 1952, when he visited Chartres and made detailed studies of the medieval windows. As a result, colour flooded into his paintings' (Susan Compton, Chagall (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1985, p. 254). Here he experiments with nearly geometric areas of bright primary pigments used to heighten the range of hues and prevents the fully modelled motifs from advancing out of the picture plane.