The Poet with the Birds

Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk, a city in present-day Belarus. The eldest son of a Jewish family, he left home at nineteen to pursue artistic training in St. Petersburg. He moved to Paris in 1910 and the following year, he painted this contemplative scene of a man daydreaming, looking up at white birds in a swirling landscape. With the new freedom Chagall found in France, his work became increasingly fantastical, anticipating Surrealist art of the 1920s and 1930s. A movement in both literature and visual art, Surrealism aimed to tap into the subconscious mind, often through dreamlike imagery.