The Circus

Chagall is a solitary figure of the Paris School. He came to Paris for the first time in 1910 and settled at Montparnasse. With his exceptional feeling for colour he painted a new dream world, a merging of reality and fantasy, from which all physical laws of the material world were excluded. At the Circus belongs to a set of paintings, which Chagall painted in 1927 at the suggestion of Ambroise Vollard. The female figure looped around the horse's neck seemingly disregarding the possibilities of anatomy, the apparently weightless space of the circus tent and the subtle colours - these are features that place this picture among the exceptional works of Chagall's imaginative art.