Marc Chagall

Lovers float above a roof and a cow plays the violin. There is no gravity in Chagall's paintings. He refused to call this fantasy and called it memory. He grew up in the Jewish town of Vitebsk in Belarus, and its wooden houses, festivals, rabbis and livestock remained his subject for life. Revolution and two wars moved him between Paris and New York, but the paintings always went home. He left a large body of stained glass alongside the canvases — the ceiling of the Palais Garnier in Paris and the windows of the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem are his. He died in the south of France in 1985, aged ninety-seven.