He was also so poor early on that his famed 1912 work Fiddler – a picture of a violinist dancing on a rooftop – was painted on a tablecloth when Chagall was a struggling immigrant in Paris.
The checkered pattern of the cloth is clearly visible in parts of the painting where the paint is thin, they said.
“He had so little money that he bought canvases from flea markets, you know he painted on any canvas he got his hands on,” said Meta Chavannes, a conservator at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. “So a bed sheet, or a night shirt, even a tablecloth.”
The discoveries were made by researchers who spent five years studying the museum’s large collection of works by Chagall.
The S tedelijk, or city museum, houses modern and contemporary art and will put 38 Chagall works on display this month, together with other pieces by immigrant artists in Paris who changed modern art, including Picasso and Mondrian.
Co-conservator Madeleine Bisschoff said it was typical of Chagall’s work that much of his focus was concentrated in one or two key areas of a painting.