Thanks to his iron-willed mother, who enrolled him in the only art school in the Pale of Settlement (the area of western Russia to which Catherine the Great had confined the jews in her empire), he was taught to draw from plaster casts and, at the age of 19, sent to study a life model in St Petersburg. In the years that followed, Chagall painted the pictures of his first maturity. In the first version of Birth from 1910, the setting is a wooden shtetl house painted in a sombre palette of muddy red, sour yellow and brown. Linear perspective leads the eye to the naked mother lying on bloodstained sheets, the grim midwife holding the newborn child and the father cowering under the bed, while in the background neighbours and a rabbi look in at the window and push through the door. What makes the picture broadly “modern” in feel is the use of expressive distortion in rendering of heavily outlined figures inspired by peasant and folk art. The Jewish subject matter and absurdist whimsy is Chagall’s own.