At the centre of the composition of Deux vases de fleurs is an exuberance of flowers, two bouquets, one seemingly of mimosas, the other of a variety of red, pink, orange and white blooms. Chagall inextricably linked flowers with France, the subject initially captivating him whilst in Toulon in 1924 and he claimed he had never known flowers before whilst in Russia. Here, the energetic and effervescent brush strokes with which Chagall creates the two bouquets seems redolent with joy and exuberance, conveying palpable emotion through colour and touches of paint alone.

Surrounding the blossoms, vignettes of instantly recognisable motifs personal to Chagall are arranged in a circular format, amongst them a cockerel, an angel, the Eiffel tower and the rooftops of Vitebsk. At the bottom of the work are Chagall’s lovers, floating into view. First seen in Birthday, 1915, the floating couple are perhaps Chagall’s most famous subject - as Susan Compton has written ‘their joy has levitated them from the ground.’ (Susan Compton, Chagall, London, 1985, p. 15). The Birthday was painted the year that Chagall married Bella Rosenfeld, to whom he was blissfully married until her death in 1944, and his depictions of flowers came to be another way to express romance and love, first associated thus, so Compton has noted, from The Birthday onwards.

With these individual tropes encircling the composition, Chagall suggests a unity and interconnectedness between the personal and the universal, of the linkages between heaven and earth, home and away, love and art and nature.