© Marc Chagall estate

Le Cheval et l’âne (The Horse and the Donkey) belongs to a series of works which the dealer Ambroise Vollard comissioned Chagall to produce in 1926 to illustrate the French seventeenth-century poet La Fontaine’s famous Fables. The commission caused much controversy, as commentators asked why a Russian Jew, a foreigner to French culture, should be selected to illustrate a classic of French literature. Vollard responded that Chagall’s aesthetic had something akin to La Fontaine’s: it was ‘at once sound and delicate, realistic and fantastic’. Chagall frequently used animals for symbolic purposes bringing together aspects of French tradition and Russian folklore in dream-like settings. Here, a horse and a donkey are shown out of perspective with a despairing farmer behind them: the horse after refusing to share the donkey’s heavy load must now carry his dead companion. The cycle was completed by 1927 and the works (in gouache) were sold on to the dealer Bernheim-Jeune, who showed them in a highly successful exhibition in February 1930, which travelled on to the Flechtheim Gallery in Berlin; every work was sold. The illustrations were not printed in book form during Vollard's lifetime however owing to technical difficulties; Chagall made a number of etchings in 1939, completing them in 1952. This etching is included in the two-volume edition of the Fables, "Fables, Eaux-fortes originales de MARC CHAGALL", published by Tériade in February 1952, followed by an exhibition of the etchings at the Galeries Maeght in Paris in March.