Four Tales from the Arabian Nights, Pantheon Books, New York, 1948 (Mourlot 36-47; Cramer books 18)

Chagall's involvement with printmaking began in 1922 when he produced a suite of etchings and drypoints for his unpublished autobiography Mein Lieben (My Life). With no previous formal training in printmaking, Chagall fell in love with the graphic medium and immediately tried his hand at several other techniques, including woodcut and lithography. He recalled years later in 1960: "When I held a lithographic stone or a copperplate in my hand I thought I was touching a talisman. It seemed to me that I could put all my joys and sorrows in it...Everything that touched my life through the years, births, deaths, weddings, flowers, animals, birds, the poor workers, my parents, lovers in the night, the biblical prophets, on the street, at home, in the temple and in heaven. And as I grew older, the tragedy of life within us and around us."
One such work that came to inform a significant part of Chagall's graphic output was his earliest color lithographs Four Tales from The Arabian Nights. Although Chagall created black-printed lithographs earlier in France, never had he tried his hand at color lithography. From The Arabian Nights, he chose a few which addressed themes of lost love, reunion and death creating a total of thirteen compositions. The combination of these exotic tales of fantasy and the vivid color and imagery of Chagall, sometimes described as naive realism, proved to be an intoxicating and sentimental blend. The spectacular results published in 1948, which earned him the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennial of the same year, confirmed the artist's affinity for the medium, whose initial steps in his graphic work often involved working out the imagery and colors in gouache on paper to be replicated on stone.