On this day: Marc Chagall dies

Visitors to his Jerusalem Windows cannot fail to be struck by the beauty and vibrancy of Jewish artist Marc Chagall’s designs, each featuring one featuring a different tribe of Israel. Bur the Russian born artist, who was 97 when he died, had a legacy that extended far beyond the Hadassah hospital in Israel.

Moishe Shagall was born in what is now Belarus, in the Pale of Settlement, the eldest of nine. His father was a herring merchant, a religious man, like many in the town. But at the age of 20 he went to study art in St Petersburg, later moving to France to pursue his career as a modernist painter.

During the Holocaust he fled from his adopted home to America. He also painted in response to what he was seeing around him, including in the 1945 work Apocalypse in Lilac where a naked Christ is shown raging at a Nazi storm trooper and in the background figures are explicitly tortured by Nazi troops.

His famous windows depicted the biblical point when Jacob blessed his sons and they saw visions of the future.