“But I’ve forgotten to mention you, Uncle Noah, how I used to go with you into the countryside looking for cattle. How glad I was when you agreed to take me on your rickety cart […]. Road after road, fine gravel, Uncle Noah would shout giddy-up to the horse.”

Marc Chagall’s hometown of Vitebsk always played a key role in his life and work. It is there that he spent his childhood and began the artistic training that was to be completed in Saint Petersburg and then Paris, where he came under the influence of Cubism and Expressionism between 1910 and 1914. He also founded an art school in Vitebsk in 1919, after the Russian Revolution, but resigned soon afterwards. When he left Russia definitively in 1922, arriving in Berlin in the summer, his possessions included some autobiographical notes for an illustrated book on life in his city, his family, and the people and places of his youth. In the space of a few weeks he completed the series of twenty etchings, some of which with drypoint, published by Paul Cassirer in the portfolio Mein Leben (My Life, 1923). The French edition of the text did not appear until 1931. 

Rêve de mon Pays natal (Dream of My Native Land) (1926) is a version on a larger scale of Haus in Witebsk (House in Vitebsk, 1922, Mein Leben, no. 11), which shows the red-brick house of his childhood on Pokrovskaya Street (fig. 1). The scene is animated by lively strokes of colour. The two figures on the horse-drawn cart seem to refer to a memory evoked in the autobiography: “But I’ve forgotten to mention you, Uncle Noah, how I used to go with you into the countryside looking for cattle. How glad I was when you agreed to take me on your rickety cart […]. Road after road, fine gravel, Uncle Noah would shout giddy-up to the horse.”¹ The figures in mid-air are drawn from the formal model of the popular Russian and Yiddish image of Jews living hand to mouth, devoid of material goods and referred to as “people of air” (luftmentsh in Yiddish). The childhood home and the passenger on the cart (the archetypal Wandering Jew, a mixture of fantasy and reality) reappear in several contemporary works including Les maisonnettes rouges (The Red Little Houses, 1922-25, fig. 2), which is in turn a fairly faithful reversed version of another engraving from Mein Leben, namely Haus in Peskowatik (House in Peskowatik, no. 8, etching and drypoint - fig. 3). The house of his birth in Peskowatik is, however, adorned with elements from the home on Pokrovskaya street such as the bricks and the decoration over the windows. 

The resumption of a composition attributable to the context of the Russian years can be consistently dated to the period 1923-26, when Chagall had settled in France and alternated new compositional approaches with variants based on the memory of earlier works, in some cases repeating lost paintings of the 1910s. Having arrived in Paris in September 1923, he came under the influence of the painting of his adopted country but without ever abandoning the imagery of the Russian universe. Between 1924 and 1927 he painted landscapes, views from the window with skies full of blue-white clouds and bunches of flowers. These also appeared in his tempera paintings (see the sky in Rêve de mon Pays natal) and in the preparatory drawings for his graphic works, which were shown in exhibitions together with the others. An example is provided by the gouache studies for the engravings of La Fontaine’s Fables, commissioned by Ambroise Vollard and mostly produced in 1926, which were exhibited by Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1930. The early part of 1926 also saw the artist’s first solo show in the United States, held at the Reinhardt Galleries in New York and featuring about a hundred works. 

Cerruti bought Rêve de mon Pays natal through a British dealer in July 2005. The decision to include a Chagall in the collection was probably influenced by the exhibition Marc Chagall. Un maestro del ’900 at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Gam), Turin, in 2004, the catalogue of which is included in Cerruti’s library as well as the catalogue of the retrospective Chagall connu et inconnu (Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, and San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, 2003). Evidence of earlier interest in purchasing a work by the Russian master is provided by the presence in Cerruti’s archives of documentation on Les amoureux sur un traineau (Lovers on a Sled), received in 1997 at more or less the same time as the exhibition Chagall e il suo ambiente, gli anni russi at the Gam in Turin (1997-98). 

Valeria D’Urso 

¹ Chagall 1998, pp. 24-25.