Marc Chagall Home

The key exhibit of the museum is the stone house where Marc Chagall spent his childhood and adolescence. The exposition includes household items from the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, copies of archival photographs and documents, works of artist Marc Chagall, telling about the life of the artist and his family. Several items that belonged to the Chagall family are on display. The exhibition consists of the following sections (halls): "The Grocery Store," "The Boys' Room," "The Living Room," "The Red Room," and "The Kitchen." The author of the artistic solution of the exposition is Yuri Chernyak. The interior of the house was reconstructed according to archival documents and works by Marc Chagall, made in the Vitebsk period of his life.

At the end of the XIX century, after the birth of Marc and the death of the artist's grandfather, Marc's father Hatzkel Chagall bought a wooden house (not preserved) on Pokrovskaya street. Prior to that, the Chagals lived in the Peskovatik neighborhood, where the artist was born.

Between 1901 and 1905, next to the wooden building, the Chagals built a one-story brick house, which has survived to this day. It is in this house that the museum exposition is located now. According to archival documents, we know that Khatskel and Feyga-Ita Chagaly (father and mother of the artist) on Bolshaya Pokrovskaya Street owned real estate in the form of "a stone one-story house with a shop, a wooden house, two wings in the yard and a plank barn. All the wooden buildings were destroyed during the war. In 1991 the Vitebsk city executive committee decided to create in Vitebsk the Museum of Marc Chagall. At the same time under the direction of the first director of the museum Arkady Podlipski the small museum exposition was opened in one of the rooms of the house on Pokrovskaya street where the family of the house-painter Zinovy Meitin still lived.

During the next years, the restoration of the artist's parental home was financed by the Vitebsk City Executive Committee with the participation of the "Circle of Assistance "Chagall House-Museum in Vitebsk" from Nienburg (Germany) and the necessary exhibits were gathered by the museum workers.

The House-Museum of Marc Chagall received its first visitors on July 6, 1997, the day of the 110th anniversary of the artist. In the same year a wooden house next to the stone one was restored. The location of the other houses, which were at the back of the site, is still problematic.

A monument to the artist "Vitebsk melody on a French violin" by Vitebsk sculptor Valery Moguchy was erected in the museum yard. In the summer of 1998 archeological excavations were carried out near the museum building. There were found the remains of ceramics, smoking pipes, bottles and other household items of XVIII-XX centuries.

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