number 201 of 275 sets signed by chagall on the justification page.
The Bible was a commission from Ambroise Vollard that took Chagall twenty-five years to complete. In preparation for the series, he travelled to Palestine to develop a sense of the spirit of the land and to study its particular range of light and shadow. He returned to Paris and began working on the first 65 etchings between 1931 and 1939. Upon Vollard's death in 1939, the project was taken over by editor and publisher Tériade. Between 1952 and 1956 the remaining forty etchings were completed and printed. At that time, Tériade reproduced the etchings in a special issue of their publication Verve (volume 8, numbers 33-34, Paris, 1956).
The Bible illustrations are among Chagall's most restrained and literal works. The passages of the Old Testament that he chose to depict were relevant to events of modern Jewish history such as the escape from Egyptian slavery and the stories of David, Isaiah, Joshua, Saul, and Solomon (in which the Israelites establish a political nation). His artistic treatment was less fantastic and nostalgic than most of his oeuvre. Instead of using the quaint and provincial settings of his native Russia, he created landscapes that celebrated the ancient dramas of God and man. Chagall first worked the compositions in gouache and then translated them into etchings. He liked the way the medium achieved the effects of shadows, the scratched fields of light and dark that would be difficult to achieve in paint. His dark lines, hatchings, and graphic effects of radiating light are reminiscent of Rembrandt's etching techniques, and the sympathetic depiction of Jews and the composition of the Dutch master's own Bible illustrations were clearly a strong influence.
Meyer Schapiro wrote that Chagall was the ideal artist to have undertaken the task of illustrating the Bible as he: "is a rare modern painter whose art has been accessible to the full range of his emotions and thoughts. . . . He has represented themes of an older tradition not in a spirit of curiosity or artifice, but with a noble devotion. . . If we had nothing of Chagall but his Bible, he would be for us a great modern artist"--Verve 33/34; Cramer 29; The Artist & the Book 53; "The Bible Illustrations of Marc Chagall," in The Bible Illustrations of Marc Chagall, exhibition catalogue essay, Milwaukee, Haggerty Museum, Marquette University, l989.
