Marc Chagall (1887-1985) - Maternité (CS 7)

Technique: Lithography
Support: Arches paper
Numbering: 40/300
Double signature: Hand-signed in pencil, then gifted, inscribed, and signed with a ballpoint pen 'Marc Chagall 1955'.
Dimensions: 58.8 × 79 cm

Good overall condition. The paper is evenly browned due to the age of the lithograph, with discolorations at the edges of the sheet. There are traces of an old mounting (framing) on the back. The lithographed part is intact and in perfect condition.

Authentication: Work sold with a certificate of authenticity. Reference: Mourlot Charles Sorlier 7, p. 196. Published by Galerie Maeght, Paris, and printed by Charles Sorlier under the direction of Marc Chagall.

Information about the work: It was in 1950, shortly after his definitive return to France following World War II, that Marc Chagall settled in Vence, in a house near the Chapel of the Rosary, which Matisse was then decorating with his stained glass windows. This extended stay on the Côte d’Azur, lasting until 1966, marked one of the most fruitful periods of his artistic life. The climate, light, gentle landscape, and rich vegetation of the South exert a decisive influence on him: his painting transforms there, gaining in sensuality, freedom, and clarity. The themes focus more on intimacy, love, music, religious and family memory, in an explosion of increasingly magical colors. Vence becomes for Chagall a place of inspiration where he explores forms and techniques, in painting as well as in ceramics, sculpture, mosaics, stained glass, or tapestry.


The Maternity lithograph, printed in 1954 in an edition of 300 copies, fully embodies this Vencean vein: both biblical and profoundly human, it depicts a scene of sacred intimacy, likely inspired by the renewed spirit of that era. Indeed, it is also in Vence that Chagall met Valentina Brodsky, known as 'Vava', who would become his second wife. Their union in 1952 heralded a more peaceful period of life, centered on family, the studio, creation, and Mediterranean roots. The tenderness emanating from Maternity, its atmosphere of domestic peace, resonates with this new emotional stability, and finds echoes in other works from that period, where the figure of the child, the couple, or the mother recurs, often crowned with a sense of luminous grace.

Offered in Vence in 1955 to a certain Dr. Marcel Vergnory, a military doctor who practiced in Lyon and authored a medical treatise in 1919. 'For Marcel Vergnory and Mrs., as a souvenir, Vence.'