PROVENANCE
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (label on verso)
Kahan Esikoff Fine Arts Ltd., New York (label on verso)
The Art Emporium, Vancouver (label on verso)
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Robert Hughes, "Fiddler on The Roof of Modernism", Time Magazine, April 8, 1985

When Marc Chagall died in 1985, Robert Hughes, writing his summary of the artist’s career for Time Magazine, stated, “He had a lyric, flyaway, enraptured imagination, allied to an enviable fluency of hand.” Those words remain apt in describing what meets the eye in La Moissonneuse, a mid-career painting that includes many elements that define Chagall’s visual world. The subject, far-removed from urban Paris, is inspired by the landscape of the Holy Land, which was prominent in the the artist’s mind from the mid-1950s when he was working on his designs for what was to become one of his most recognized public commissions, the Jerusalem Windows installed at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital in 1962. His ever-luminous palette enriches a pastoral scene that speaks of the Old Testament as much as it does of the twentieth century, with the hilly landscape dotted by olive trees, the sensually drawn young woman leading a goat, a sheaf of wheat held over her head as a symbol of a successful harvest and the male figure in blue, floating above the hills in the guise of a modern-day Moses.

A photo-certificate from Pierre Matisse, signed and dated 1978, accompanies this work.

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