Marc Chagall - Le Cirque

Les Fables de la Fontaine

100 Hand Colored Etchings
Engraved between
1927 and 1930
Printed by the Imprimerie Nationale de France in 1952

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By the late 1920s, Marc Chagall was in his middle years living a bohemian lifestyle in Paris with his beloved wife Bella and their daughter. When he wasn’t creating art, he was spending his time in cafés exchanging views with other artists, writers, and poets. The artworks he produced during those years included many of his finest: extraordinary images charged with highly personal, emotional and poetic associations. Chagall was at the peak of his expressive powers, the master of his technique, and filled with confidence in the freshness of his style and artistic vision.

A few years earlier in 1923, the great French art dealer and publisher, Ambroise Vollard, launched Chagall’s lifelong love of printmaking by commissioning the first of three great series of etchings. Dead Souls, a monumental undertaking, took three years to complete and produced over 100 etching plates illustrating Gogol’s classic novel. Many of these etchings were obvious harbingers of Chagall masterpieces to come. His fanciful, often humorous treatment of his subject matter; his willingness to abandon standard rules of pictorial logic in favor of personal metaphor and fluid expression; his use of story elements as springboards for his imagination rather than as mere objects for illustration — all were evident in these early etchings.

As Chagall’s work on Dead Souls neared completion, Vollard’s genius for inspiring artists with enthusiasm for new projects could be contained no longer. Before Dead Souls was even published, he placed before Chagall a daring new commission: 100 color gouaches illustrating Les Fables, that masterwork of the great 17^th century French poet, Jean de la Fontaine. Vollard’s commission was daring because he chose a Russian artist to illustrate this classic of French literature that was dear to the hearts of Frenchmen. Yet in this case, Vollard’s instinct for picking the right artist for the right project proved infallible.

La Fontaine’s Fables is a magnificent collection of over 240 fanciful poems and timeless tales of simple country folk, heroes from Greek mythology, and especially, familiar beasts of the field behaving like fallible humans; many of the tales are from Aesop’s fables or Europe’s collective lore. Each tale illustrates a moral, reveals a hard truth of life, or shares a humorous story. They are infused with La Fontaine’s love of rustic life and belief in ethical hedonism; all are written with his marvelous wit and elegance. La Fontaine reveals his immense affection for humanity, complete with its foibles, vices, and foolishness, conjured up in the guise of farm animals and farmers. Though some of La Fontaine’s Fables were considered too risqué and amoral to be suitable for the formal society of Louis XIV, the common folk of the time embraced them. Soon La Fontaine’s Fables became beloved classics of French literature, widely translated and imitated all over Europe, and recited by countless generations of French schoolchildren up to the present day.

The life of Jean de la Fontaine himself bears a marked resemblance to that of Marc Chagall. Like Chagall, La Fontaine moved to Paris in his youth, seeking the stimulation and excitement of its cafès and salons. In Paris he associated with artists and writers like Molière, mingling freely with both aristocrats and commoners, just as Chagall did. La Fontaine was considered something of a rustic and a dreamer, as was Chagall; they both spent their most productive years living and working in Paris.

Due to this natural affinity, Chagall was instantly drawn to Vollard’s new project. His deep roots in Russian farm life and great affection for its people and animals made La Fontaine’s Fables the perfect vehicle for his unbound imagination. Yet, as with Dead Souls, Chagall was not content to merely illustrate La Fontaine’s tales. He wanted to capture their spirit and emotional depth, using color and form to evoke their humor and rustic truth. By 1928 he had done so, completing 100 full color gouaches “inspired” by the Fables. Vollard liked them so much he decided to reproduce the beautiful color images for publication. It soon became apparent that Chagall’s colors were too complex for the printing processes available at the time. Chagall decided instead to create black and white etchings based on his gouaches and afterwards to add watercolor by hand. By 1931 he had created 100 magnificent etching plates.

Once again, before Vollard could publish this set, he became immersed in a new inspiration: a third set of 100 black and white etchings illustrating the Bible. This was to be Chagall’s last great series of etchings. By the time he was halfway through this new project, world events and personal tragedies began to catch up with his plans. Before any of Chagall’s three monumental etching sets could be printed and published, Ambroise Vollard died and World War II began, both in 1939. These events suspended all further work on Chagall’s etchings for more than a decade. Fortunately, when the war ended, the Parisian publisher, Tériade, picked up the task where Vollard had left off. He first printed and published Chagall’s Dead Souls in 1948, then Les Fables de la Fontaine in 1952, and finally The Bible in 1956.

Chagall fulfilled his original intention of meticulously applying watercolors by hand to 85 of the complete 200-set edition. These hand colored sets soon became the most prized and sought after portion of the edition, since they are closest to Chagall’s original intent and vision. They also offer their owners a personal connection to the artist himself, since he applied watercolor by hand to each etching in the set. This coloring by hand made each print slightly different from all others of the same image. To some extent, each hand-colored etching is unique.

Now, over half a century after their 1952 publication, history has judged this remarkable series of hand-colored etchings. Chagall’s Les Fables de la Fontaine is now part of the permanent collections of fine art museums around the world, including the prestigious Chagall Museum in Nice, France. Few other creations in the history of art have achieved such an inspired melding of the work of two great artists: one a 17^th century poet and raconteur, the other a modern painter, watercolorist and etcher.

For each of La Fontaine’s fables, Chagall conjured his unique repertoire of fantastic images and metaphors, applying them to its subject matter in a fluid and often dreamlike manner. He lifted the story to an entirely new plane, where it seems perfectly reasonable for a cat to turn into a woman or a monkey to adjudicate a dispute between a wolf and a fox. Chagall’s lifelong affection for the animal world is evident throughout the series—lambs, lions, roosters, rabbits, storks, goats, cows, peacocks—every imaginable beast and fowl, insect and fish, even an occasional man or woman, are lovingly presented to us by Chagall. Fontaine’s fables represent the spectrum of human interactions and character: they converse, cunningly outmaneuver each other, and kings behave as foolishly as their subjects. Chagall enhances each image with strategically placed color highlights to focus our attention on a particular aspect or action of the animal or person.

Few artists, past or present, could have been as well suited in talent and temperament to Vollard’s project as Marc Chagall. He respected the fanciful tones and gentle humor of La Fontaine, foregrounding his love of nature and infinite wonder of “la condition humane.” La Fontaine’s fantastic fables taught those lessons to generation after generation of French schoolchildren; Chagall’s hand-colored etchings bring them to life again for all of us.

Les Fables de la Fontaine

100 Hand Colored EtchingsEngraved between1927 and 1930Printed by the Imprimerie Nationale de France in 1952

View the suite >

Read the Annotated Poems

100 Hand Colored Etchings
Engraved between
1927 and 1930
Printed by the Imprimerie Nationale de France in 1952