Green Dream

In this work the figure of a female nude—the artist’s companion Virginia Haggard McNeil—merges with the deep green hill on which she reclines, surrounded by fruit and flowers, symbols of fertility. Marc Chagall painted this scene in the wake of several traumas, including the death of his beloved wife Bella in 1944, and the horrors of World War II. A Russian Jew who had been working in Paris among notable artistic contemporaries such as Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger, Chagall fled to the United States in 1941 to escape Nazi persecution.