Plyushkin Offers a Drink, no. 24 from the series Gogol's Dead Souls

Shortly after moving to Paris in 1923, Marc Chagall was approached by art dealer Ambroise Vollard about collaborating on an illustration project. Rejecting Vollard’s suggestions of texts, Chagall instead proposed the novel Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, a widely-recognized masterpiece of 19th-century Russian literature which offered a veiled criticism of the Russian social system through absurd satire. In this composition, the miserly landowner Plyushkin offers a drink to Chichikov, the novel’s protagonist. Due to Chagall’s flight from German-occupied France during World War II and Vollard’s death in 1939, the series of etchings remained unpublished until 1950.