Mark Zakharovich Shagal, later celebrated as Marc Chagall, was born in the Belorussian village of Vitebsk on July 7, 1887 - the oldest among nine children in a family of rich Hassidic faith but modest means. His father, who worked at a salt herring factory, was less than thrilled by the lad's artistic ambitions, partly for religious reasons. The 'graving of images isn't popular in Jewish Orthodox circles.

Young Chagall did have his mother's support, however, so he managed to enroll in a local painting academy in 1906, after concluding studies at heder and the Russian-language public school. In the next year (after one failed entrance exam), acceptance was won from the first of three St. Petersburg art schools he attended. His original rooftop fiddler, dating from 1908, appeared during this period.

Though you could take the boy out of Vitebsk - and in 1910, he moved to Paris, mecca of the epoch's art scene - you couldn't take Vitebsk out of the boy. Not ever.

By depicting his home village, the devotions of its residents and the gentle creatures in their care, he was to become the twentieth century's foremost chronicler of shtetl life and of Judaic and Biblical subjects in general. Even his secular works are acts of worship: lyrical celebrations of love.

Upon arrival in France at the age of 23, Chagall enjoyed early success and the friendship of other budding luminaries resident at La Ruche (The Beehive), legendary home of Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Fernand Leger, Robert Delaunay and the poets Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Appollinaire. Here he honed his craftsmanship and was influenced by Fauves, Nabis, Simultaneists, Luminists and Cubists, while further exploring the traditions of Slav expressionism, folk art and icon painting.

By 1914, when he returned to Vitebsk to marry his sweetheart after a 12-year engagement (almost as long as Jacob waited for Rachel!), he was already a truly cosmopolitan artist. His work had been exhibited in Paris, Moscow and even Berlin, where the gallery of the trail-blazing modernist publication, Der Sturm, gave him a one-man show.

Chagall meant to bring his bride, the former Bella Rosenberg, to France; however, World War I intervened to keep the newlyweds in Russia. They settled first in St. Petersburg and, after the Russian Revolution, made their home in Vitebsk. Here Chagall established an art academy and became its most popular teacher until politics caused him to be ousted from his own institution. The so-called "Malevich faction" of Suprematist artists wanted to limit aesthetic points of view, which didn't suit Chagall's eclectic outlook.

Moving next to Moscow, he collaborated with theatres and created breathtaking backdrops and costumes for seminal productions including Diaghilev ballets set to the then avant-garde music of Stravinsky. He also painted the first of his large-scale murals for public places, gaining experience he would apply decades later to the Paris Opera House and New York's Metropolitan Opera.

A second European chapter of his life opened in 1922. After a year in Berlin, where he learned the craft of print-making, Chagall brought Bella - and their daughter - to Paris at last!

The city received them warmly. Chagall's first major retrospective took place right away: in 1924, hosted by the Galerie Barbazanges-Hoderbart.

Exuberant images of romance and circuses capture the gaiety of this remarkable era...

His pictures grew wildly popular, his etchings illustrated Nikolay Gogol's novel, Dead Souls and Jean de la Fontaine's Fables and Chagall's reputation as a modern master was cemented by a major 1933 retrospective at Basel's Kunsthalle.

With the growing threat of Nazism, his vision altered:
The artist of the poetic White Window became that of the powerful White Crucifixion. In 1940, when Hitler's forces swept into France, the Chagalls fled southward to the Loire district - and then still farther south. With Nazi occupation of Vichy territory in 1943, their French idyll ended.

Begun in the aftermath of World War II, The Fall of the Angel (aka The Falling Angel) was completed 24 years later, following another global conflict. When in 1947 the work stood finished, Europe lay in ruins and so did the artist's heart.

His beloved Bella having died in 1944 - not at Nazi hands, but during the family's wartime exile in America - Chagall found solace in producing backdrops and costumes for another postwar Firebird, this in New York rather than Moscow. He then returned to France and, time and again, in memory to Bella.

With a second marriage in 1952 to Valentine (Vava) Brodskii, he began a second career dominated by achievements of an almost architectural nature: his splendid ceiling for the Paris Opera, Metropolitan Opera murals and spectacular works in stained glass, including representations of the fine arts and the tribes of Israel.

Chagall's stunning windows appear not only in synagogues but also in cathedrals and churches, as well as in the United Nations building and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Always ecumenical in spirit, Chagall left this joyous Procession de Noel as one of his final works. It was painted in 1978, a year after his massive retrospective exhibition drew crowds to the Louvre and seven years before his death, while another comprehensive show was open at London's Royal Academy of Art.

The many paintings, lithographs and monotypes of this prolific artist can be seen in public and private collections around the world -even in Vitebsk, where his childhood home became a museum in 1996. Another aspect of his legacy is the National Museum of the Marc Chagall Biblical Message, dedicated at Nice in 1973.