A painter, engraver and sculptor, Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was born in Russia of Orthodox Jewish stock. After an early working visit to Paris he made his home there in 1923, spending the war years in the United States. His painting is a synthesis of the Jewish and Russian cultural traditions, a world that seems to float in space, half-realistic, half-symbolic. We find all the great events of human life observed by an eye that has retained a child’s innocence, love of vivid colour and even of farmyard animals.

Rather than the wine, it was the living fruit of the vine, speared by a thrush or fed by a mother to her child, that Chagall chose to bring us here for the 1970 Mouton Rothschild label.