Musee des Arts Decoratifs, 1959

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was a French-Russian artist whose style prefigured the dreamscapes of Surrealism. Regarded by Picasso as a great artist who "understands what colour really is", Chagall had a unique vision of beauty that remained faithful to the tradition of figurative art. In painting narrative or metaphoric scenes with a cast of recurring characters including the fiddler and the bride, he drew from his own personal mythology and merged it with stories he had inherited from oral legend.

Thanks to this inclusion of folk-history source material, as well as his generous use of colour, his art has a welcome feeling of homecoming and warmth. Blending the personal and universal in work that he called "the dream of not one people but of all humanity", Chagall is widely loved.