Infused with colour, Engaged Couple with Bouquet repeats a theme much loved by an artist often acclaimed as one of the most universally known and admired painters of the twentieth century – Marc Chagall.

The work in the A. G. Leventis Gallery collection repeats the theme of the lovers that appears repeatedly in Chagall’s work between 1954 and 1963 – a time which also ties in with developments in Chagall’s personal life. After his first wife, Bella, died in 1944, Chagall remarried in 1952. Valentina Brodsky, known as ‘Vava’, took on the role of his muse, and the theme of the couple, of love and marriage, appears powerfully in his work.

Reduced to two faces, and two hands inscribed inside a crescent, the lovers appear inseparable from one another and from the background that envelops them. There is much to read in the scene: a sunrise, perhaps a symbol of a new beginning; and a rooster, a village and a horse-drawn cart that could be an echo of the artist’s home, in Vitebsk, or equally Vence, which features in his work at this time. One would be wrong to interpret Chagall’s symbolic universe too literally. What is clear is that the painting draws from a joyous period in the artist’s life, and seems to reverberate this personal happiness through the intense colouring that is so strongly associated with the artist.

Signed: ChAgAll MARC (bottom left); Marc Chagall (on the reverse with a black brush)

PROVENANCE: Sale, Tableaux modernes, Palais Galliéra, Paris, 1 December 1967, no. A, illus.

EXHIBITION: Hommage à Chagall. Œuvres de 1947-1967, Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 7 August – 30 September 1967, no. 65; Athens 2012.

LITERATURE: NG 2012, pp. 34-35, 208, caption p. 78, illus.: pp. 8, 79.