It was in 1950, shortly after his permanent return to France following the Second World War, that Marc Chagall settled in Vence, in a house located near the Chapel of the Rosary, which Henri Matisse was then adorning with stained glass windows. This extended stay on the French Riviera, lasting until 1966, marks one of the most fertile periods of Chagall’s artistic life. The climate, the light, the gentle landscape, and the lush vegetation of the Mediterranean region exerted a decisive influence on him: his painting was transformed, gaining in sensuality, freedom, and clarity. His themes increasingly turned toward intimacy, love, music, and religious and familial memory, unfolding in an ever more magical explosion of color. Vence became a place of inspiration where Chagall explored forms and techniques across multiple media, including painting, ceramics, sculpture, mosaic, stained glass, and tapestry.
The lithograph Maternité, printed in 1954 in an edition of 300, fully belongs to this Vençoise period. Both biblical and deeply human, it depicts a scene of sacred intimacy, undoubtedly inspired by the renewed creative spirit of this time. It was also in Vence that Chagall met Valentina Brodsky, known as “Vava,” who would become his second wife. Their marriage in 1952 ushered in a more serene phase of life, centered on family, the studio, artistic creation, and a deep Mediterranean rootedness. The tenderness that emanates from Maternité, its atmosphere of domestic peace, resonates with this newfound emotional stability and finds echoes in other works from the same period, in which the figures of the child, the couple, and the mother recur, often bathed in a sense of luminous grace.
The work was offered in Vence in 1955 to Dr. Marcel Vergnory, a military physician who had practiced in Lyon and was the author of a medical treatise published in 1919. The dedication reads: “For Marcel Vergnory and his wife, as a remembrance, Vence.”
