The Lock of Love – From Chagall to Rembrandt, and Back

There is an interesting and telling gesture and declaration of love and admiration, and the conscious sign of choosing his artistic path being led by the highest possible professional standard, the one by Rembrandt, by 27-year Marc Chagall in one of his most vivid portraits created in 1914.

1914 is one of the most decisive years for Chagall, reflecting the world which never was the same after the Great War started in that year. By then, Chagall had been in Paris for three years already. And being in Paris for young enough Chagall, who was 24 on his arrival there, meant to be in Louvre where his soul was developing and blossoming, absorbing the wealth of the world and civilization art in a dizzy indulgence.

Rembrandt was the world, the cosmos and everything for Chagall from the moment he saw the works of that titan, the titan of art of all times. Rembrandt has become a starting point, metaphorically, for Marc Chagall in his vision of art, and having such a solid ground in very visioning of art in general, the level of Chagall’s own art always was steady, and it was always high. The top. Never faltering, under any circumstances, till the very end of his very long, almost a century-long life. This is not the case for many other artists.

With all his ostensibly easiness of subject-matters and related images, which led to some existing , grossly wrong attributions of the Chagall’s art to the school of naive art, he is a superb master of a highest order and craft who was always led , consciously and by his own choice of a top demand and strive, by the utmost best ones, Rembrandt in the visual art, and Mozart and Bach in music.

When you see the world and your profession through the prism of a highest demand, your own effort brings the corresponding result. That young Chagall realized early on. Three years in Paris , this was largely in Louvre, in his mid-20s, amid fierce work brought the result, with his first gallery contract in Paris, and yet more importantly, especially for him feeling lonely and under-appreciated, with his first solo exhibition in Berlin. Chagall was ecstatic about that first personal exhibition and not anywhere but Berlin, thriving, magnetic and bubbling with a non-stop public appetite for art.

Rembrandt’s effect on Marc Chagall was giant, and because of its depth and continuation, Chagall evolved into painting a huge number of self-portraits, following the pattern set by Rembrandt, the most prolific author of his time. The number of confirmed self-portraits by Rembrandt in all techniques, oil, drawing and etching comes to one hundred. The number of Chagall’s self-portraits is several time more, but the pattern of a perpetual artistic self- search and self-expression via the most familiar to an artist subject, himself, was set for Marc Chagall by his deep admiration, and more, his detailed understanding of Rembrandt, and his certain partial self-identification with the great master, his principal teacher, as goes.

In 1914, 27-year Chagall paints his charming, vivid, expressive and quite masterly Self-Portrait in Front of the House in unusual for his self-portraits official attire, but with a joking and pointing color of the artist’s trousers, that bright and outpouring blue which he adopted as his color for life. His jacket is rich brown, with enlightened spots so familiar to many of us from another master, the one of the 17th century, whose brown has imprinted in our collective retina the same deep, as Chagall’s blue did.

Rembrandt van Rijn (C). Self-Portrait with a Gorget. Oil on oak panel. 38,2 x 31 cm. 1629. Germanisches Nationalmuseum. Nuremberg. Germany. Rembrandt Project – with kind permission.

It is not without reason that Chagall believed that ‘blue for me is the same that brown for Rembrandt’, and in the making his jacket not just brown, but decisively and declaratively Rembrandt-like brown, Chagall who, with his first gallery contract signed in Paris and his first big and serious solo exhibition in Berlin, had been just accepted in the club of artist-masters, as he understood it, with a proper reasoning, was referring in his charming and special self-portrait to his teachers of teachers, who lived and worked three hundreds years before him. And not only the jacket.

Marc Chagall (C). Self-Portrait in Front of the House. Oil on cardboard mounted on canvas. 50,7×38 cm. 1914. Private collection (C) ADAGP, Paris. With kind permission.

In the Chagall’s self-portrait in question, we see his left-side lock as a longer one. What does it tell us? It does tell those who know Rembrandt well enough, to remember about his asymmetrical left lock in his second oil-painted self-portrait of 1629 known as Self-Portrait with Gorget, or Self-Portrait With Breastplate.

Lovelock as that asymmetrical lock of hair was known from the 16th century, came from France, and was highly popular there. Not so was the case in the Netherlands of the 17th century, it was a sign of teasing and demonstration of emphasized, publicly demonstrated independence by some young men there. A bit of an intentional over-doing. And young Rembrandt who was 23 at the time of painting his second oil self-portrait, took care to show his lovelock the same expressively as his famous breastplate, the gorget. Or actually he made it famous by portraying it on a small oak panel.

Two hundred and eighty five years later, 27-young Marc Chagall in the year of his first serious exhibition in one of the thriving world’s capital, painted on cardboard his homage to his guiding star , of a size which is a bit larger than the Rembrandt’s self-portrait painted by him at 23 almost three hundred years earlier.

It is quite an artistic dialogue, to me. Powerful, engaged, masterly, and , most importantly, full of subdued love, as it is prescribed by good manners and right tone. Twenty-three years old Rembrandt’s self-portraying on the oak panel is fully self-reflective , as are all his self-portraits. Twenty-seven years old Chagall’s self-portrait is joyful and joyfully ceremonial. In 1629, in Leiden, young Rembrandt was discovered by his most important patron Huygens, and started to get commissions from the Dutch state and the country’s ruler. In 1914, young Chagall got his first gallery contract and his first important exhibition. He saw many reasons to create this rembrandt-ish brown with a bit of chagall-ish blue self-portrait, finishing it with that left-side asymmetrical lovelock. In his case, and now in the history of art, it was his lovelock for Rembrandt which accompanied Marc Chagall all his extremely fruitful and productive artistic life”.

Inna Rogatchi (C). Chagall Heritage Today series of essays. (C). 2024-2025.