I and the Village

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I and the Village is an early surrealist painting by the Belarussian-born French artist, Marc Chagall. It is currently exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Painted on oil in 1911, the artwork features many soft, dreamlike images overlapping each other: in the foreground, what appears to be a cap-wearing green-faced man stares intimately at a goat or a sheep with a smaller goat being milked in its cheek. In the background, there is a glowing tree, a bunch of houses next to an Orthodox church, and a female violinist is dangling upside down in front of a black-clothed man with a scythe. I and the Village seems to examine the relationship between the artist and his place of birth.