Chagall’s Tempest: An autobiographical reading

Summary

Marc Chagall's black-and-white lithographs illustrating The Tempest, executed by the artist in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight, offer a very personal, autobiographical reading of the plot and characters of the play. Chagall's single attempt to illustrate a Shakespeare play is almost unknown among art historians and Shakespeare scholars alike and barely mentioned in the many books written on the painter. Except for the Bibliothèque Nationale, the book is also surprisingly missing from the online catalogues of the great libraries that I searched.

The publication details, which attest to the authenticity of the work, appear in the front and end matter. The volume was published in Monte Carlo, by Editions André Sauret, under the supervision of Charles Sorlier. The hand-set text, in the new font Romain du Roi engraved by Philippe Grandjean,was printed by the Imprimerie Nationale of France, while the original lithographs by Marc Chagall were printed on the presses of Fernand Mourlot in Paris.

Alongside the English text of the play, the book contains fifty original lithographs by Marc Chagall, of which thirty-one are full-page hors-texte illustrations and nineteen serve as headers or footers to the printed text, some of them half-page size. The total run was of two hundred and fifty numbered copies, plus twenty copies for contributors (numbered I to XX), printed on Vélin d'Arches paper, small folio size, 243 pages, loose sheets vellumboxed, and signed by the artist.