Marc Chagall was a Russian-French-Jewish painter, illustrator and stage designer and one of the 20th century’s most extraordinary colourists. In 1954, Pablo Picasso remarked, 'When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter alive who truly understands what colour really is.'

Unlike most printmakers, who began with a black outline and added colour carefully in layers, Chagall flooded his lithographs with pigment, building plate upon plate until they glowed with the richness of painting. The result feels less like print and more like an original.

By the late 1940s, after revolution, exile and two world wars, Chagall returned to Paris and began experimenting at Atelier Mourlot. He later described the lithographic stone as a talisman capable of holding his joys and sorrows – lovers, flowers, animals and prophets – all the poetry and tragedy of life. He worked almost until his death in 1985, the last great survivor of European Modernism, still painting in colour as if it were a language entirely his own.