signed lower left centre
gouache on paper
12.5 by 11in. 32 by 28cm.
This incredibly rare early work, which had been unseen for 30 years when we located it in a private collection on behalf of one of our clients in the USA, shows Chagall at his most personal and emotional. It was probably executed in Paris in the first months of his arrival there from his home town of Vitebsk. The artist is dwelling on his memories of Russia and his life in the shtetl: with its relatively small size and intimate subject-matter, there is a strong devotional air to it, drawing heavily on the tradition of the Russian icon.
In contrast to his later work with its more generalised and inclusive spirituality, these early pictures show Chagall at his most profoundly Jewish. The palette is jewel-like in its intensity, reflecting the depth and complexity of his feelings for his homeland and the hardships that it visited upon his race - there is none of the gentle lyricism of the later and better-known pictures.
The subject is the ritual cleansing of the house on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, by driving the chickens in from the yard and chasing them through each room. This robust method of purification is presumably the origin of the more refined, if somewhat less exciting, modern custom of cleaning the house with a feather.
Provenance:
Private Collection, Munich
Literature:
Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, Thames & Hudson, London, 1964, pp.187, 740,
full page illustration (as watercolour on paper);
Aleksandr Kamensky, Chagall: The Russian Years 1907-1922, Thames & Hudson, London, 1989,
pp. 145, 149, illustrated (as The Eve of the Day of Atonement).
