Die Braut mit dem Blumenstrauß

In this painting, Marc Chagall combines three motifs—bride, bunch of flowers, and house—although their spatial arrangement against the deep blue night sky remains fanciful and vague. As is often the case in the work of the Russian artist, dream and reality intermix and the picture displays its own expressive logic, but also a subtle magic which, not least, is a result of Chagall’s characteristic and lively dabbed application of paint.

The bride floats above the house and the Earth. She is holding a bunch of flowers in her lap and is gazing with a sense of astonishment at an even larger bouquet to her left which looks like a transfigured tree. Such a metamorphosis of objects can be found in many of Chagall’s works. The motif of the bride also appears numerous times in the work of the Jewish artist. She can be seen, on the one hand, in a figurative sense as a religious picture expressing the union of the Jewish people with God, but also as representing Chagall’s wife, Bella Rosenfeld, whom he described as the “ideal” inspiring his work.