Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall spent his whole long life painting a small Jewish town he left as a young man. He was born in 1887 near Vitebsk, then a corner of the Russian Empire, into a crowded, poor, deeply religious world of wooden houses, fiddlers, and market animals. When he became a modern painter in Paris and later a famous one, that town kept floating up into his canvases, often literally — lovers, cows, and rooftops drifting weightless through the sky.

The lover in so many of them was Bella Rosenfeld, a jeweller's daughter from Vitebsk he married in 1915. In pictures like Birthday he painted the two of them lifting off the floor mid-kiss, and he returned to that image of flight for the rest of his life. It was his private language for happiness, and it held even as the century turned dark around him.

Chagall was Jewish at the worst possible time to be a Jew in Europe. He had already left revolutionary Russia when the Nazis came, and in 1941 he fled occupied France for New York, one step ahead of the deportations that would murder most of the world he grew up in. Bella died there in 1944. He went back to France after the war, married again, and lived to 97, spending his last decades making stained-glass windows for churches and synagogues from Reims to Jerusalem, their deep blues full of the same floating village figures.