Marc Chagall was born in 1887 in a small city in the western Russian Empire not far from the Polish frontier.

His family, which includes eight children besides himself, is devoutly Jewish and, like the majority of the some twenty thousand Jews in Vitebsk, humble without being poverty-stricken; the father works in a herring warehouse, and the mother runs a shop where she sells fish, flour, sugar, and spices.

Young Marc attended the heder, the Jewish elementary school, and later on he went to the local public school, where instruction was in Russian.

After learning the elements of drawing at school, he studied painting in the studio of a local realist, Jehuda Pen, and in 1907 went to St. Petersburg, where he studies intermittently, eventually under Léon Bakst, who is beginning a brilliant career as a stage designer.

Characteristic works of this period of early maturity are the nightmarish The Dead Man (1908; Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France), in which a roof violinist is already present.