The artist was born to a poor Jewish family in Vitebsk in the western region of Russia known as the Pale.

BBC: Chagall and the art of passion and drama

Back in Russia, at his home town of Vitebsk and then in St Petersburg (then called Petrograd), he worked on through war and revolution with equal fire, using cardboard when canvas was scarce.

ECONOMIST: Marc Chagall

But having read her wonderful evocation of Jewish Vitebsk, tsarist St Petersburg and modernist Paris, having lived as in a novel with the Hasidic families of Chagall and Bella Rosenfeld, his first wife, the reader will be hooked.

ECONOMIST: Marc Chagall

About 60 oil paintings, murals and sketches gathered together from Moscow, St Petersburg and Paris focus on the eight years Chagall spent in his home town of Vitebsk in Russia during World War 1, the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath.

BBC: Chagall and the art of passion and drama

In Vitebsk synagogues closed.

ECONOMIST: Marc Chagall