Celebrating Marc Chagall’s life-long love of printmaking, Marc Chagall, Color of Life: Prints and Artist’s Books Formerly From the Artist’s Estate features prints made over a period of sixty years, offered on the market for the first time, in remarkably fine condition.

Reflecting the artist’s exuberant palette and joyful subject matter, the sale includes many lithographs made at the legendary Parisian printshop Imprimerie Mourlot on rue de Chabrol, as well as several rare proofs extensively hand-colored in gouache or pastel. Among the highlights are La chèvre dans la nuit, an early lithograph depicting a Hasidic man wearing a tefillin, with a friendly goat, and a cockerel perched on a darkened rooftop. Maquette pour Le petit cheval, 1974, madefifty years later, is a charming scene of a rider resting with his vivid red horse beneath a tree, with a village glimpsed in the distance. Both works are populated with characters and animals from Chagall’s upbringing in Vitebsk in present day Belarus. ‘In my pictures’, he explained, ‘there is not one centimetre free from nostalgia for my native land’ (Chagall, quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall, A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 25).

The sale also reflects Chagall’s profound interest in literature, including several livre d’artiste for which Chagall produced original prints as illustrations, such as his epic cycle of lithographs in two volumes for Homer’s L’Odyssée, 1975.