For the great Russian artist Marc Chagall blue was the colour of love. In a perfect testament of a mother’s love for her lost daughter, in a small church in Tudeley England, a stained glass window created by Chagall floods the space with blue light…
Sarah Venetia d’Avigdor – Goldsmid died at just 21 years old in a sailing accident.
Just two years previously, accompanied by her mother, she had seen an exhibition in Paris of Chagall’s ‘Windows for Jerusalem’. Enthralled by these windows, on her return home to Britain, Sarah could talk of little else. Upon her tragic early death, her mother remembered her love for Chagall’s stained glass and commissioned an extraordinary memorial window:
At the bottom of the picture we see Sarah floating in the water, drowned. But as our eyes look up, there is a beautiful depiction of her resurrection. Sarah had loved to ride horses. For Chagall, horses and donkeys represented happiness, and, for him, red was the colour of joy…
And so we see Sarah, riding a red horse in the gardens of Paradise!
