An outstanding mid-career work on paper by Marc Chagall, one of the greatest colourists of the 20th Century, has become the first of Chagall’s artworks to enter Scotland’s national art collection.

The Horse Rider (L’Écuyère), 1949–53 — a lively and yet elegiac gouache focusing on the equestrienne, or female horse rider — has never previously been published or travelled to exhibitions before, meaning its acquisition by the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) presents the first opportunity for the public to view and enjoy the artwork, since it was created approximately 70 years ago.

It will enter the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection thanks to the Acceptance in Lieu scheme which enables works of art to be presented to the nation and offset against inheritance tax.

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was born Moise Shagal near the Belarussian city of Vitebsk — then part of the Russian Empire — and died at his home in France at the age of 97. His remarkably long life and varied artistic career span almost the length of the twentieth century, his journey criss-crossing France, Germany, Russia and the United States. Chagall’s ceaseless creativity and commitment to exploring the emotional power of colour in its many manifestations led to works in a huge variety of mediums and materials, from his acclaimed public commissions in stained glass to ceramics, book illustrations, printmaking and tapestries.

His many collaborations with ballet, opera and theatre companies across the world were inspired by his lifelong love of the theatre and particularly the circus, which flourished from his very first encounter as a young child with a travelling troupe of acrobats busking on the streets of Vitebsk. The circus and its cast of characters both human and animal would remain an enduring inspiration and subject matter for Chagall throughout the next eight decades.

The equestrienne is a recurring subject of Chagall’s circus works from mid-1920s Paris onwards. One of the artist’s key supporters during this time was the legendary art dealer Ambroise Vollard.  Starting in 1926, Chagall worked on an ambitious project proposed by Vollard to create a series based on the circus. They were regular visitors to the city’s historic Cirque d’Hiver Bouglione around this time, where Vollard made available his private box seats to Chagall and his young daughter Ida. Chagall completed the 19 gouaches collectively titled The Vollard Circus in 1927. He would return to this deep well of subject matter repeatedly during the remainder of his long career.

The artist’s nuanced observation of the trusted relationship between the female rider and her steed forms the core of The Horse Rider’s power and dynamic sense of energy. The dark hair and pale features of this particular horse rider recall those of Chagall’s second wife, Valentina (Vava) Brodsky, a Kiev-native who shared the artist’s Russian Jewish background, whom he met and married in 1952, during the making of this work. Alongside this protagonist, who seems to be leading her horse out of the circus, rather than riding it bareback, the work features two further circus personages: a clown dressed in white ruff (recalling Pierrot) who is floating horizontally beside the horse, and a female acrobat whose trapeze suspends her from a great height.

In a text that originally accompanied a set of 38 lithographs titled Le Cirque / The Circus (published by Tériade Éditions in 1967 and inspired by his original Vollard series forty years earlier), Chagall shared his deeply personal response to the circus as an arena of creativity and emotion: “For me a circus is a magic show that appears and disappears like a world. A circus is disturbing. It is profound. These clowns, bareback riders and acrobats have themselves at home in my visions. Why? Why am I so touched by their make-up and their grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons. Lured by their colours and make-up, I can dream of painting new psychic distortions” .

Suggesting the circus to be a metaphor for the challenging terrain of artistic life – for the path he had chosen despite its difficulties and repeated sacrifices – this important text confirms the utterly foundational role of the circus within Chagall’s imaginative worldview. Some scholars have proposed that the clown or acrobat represents the artist himself: a stand-in for Chagall on the stage of life. 

This gouache was made during a four-year period, 1949–53, which was an important time of change in Chagall’s personal and professional life. The artist’s return to France from America in 1948 represented an emotional journey back to his adopted home country after escaping seven years earlier during its Nazi occupation. In 1949, Chagall relocated temporarily to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the Côte d'Azur, but by 1950 had moved to Les Collines, an estate that became his permanent home in nearby Saint-Paul-de-Vence. During the early 1950s, the area was seen as an artistic colony, with both Matisse and Picasso living nearby. It is around this time that gouache became a preferred medium for the artist, who focused on rich blues as a response to the beautiful sunlight in the south of France.

This gouache was acquired in 1954, the year following its completion, by a well-regarded collector from the Galerie Rosengart in Lucerne, Switzerland. Galerie Rosengart’s founders had a longstanding relationship with Chagall and exhibited his gouache and colour wash drawings on numerous occasions. This particular work has remained in the same family since 1954, being inherited by the collector’s grandchildren, one of whom is based in Edinburgh. The Galleries’ acquisition of this treasured family heirloom allows the public to view it for the first time.

In the early 1950s, at the time of this work’s making, Pablo Picasso declared that: “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is”. Blue is unquestionably the colour with which Chagall is most closely associated – from his paintings to his stained glass for cathedrals and synagogues. The intensely blue gouaches from this period are inspired by the sea and strong light of the south of France and have a well-regarded status within the artist’s output and, indeed, within the wider context of post-war French art.

The National Galleries of Scotland are grateful to Christie’s London for the role it played in making the allocation of this work on paper to the collection.