One of Davie's most important paintings of the mid 1960s.

As early as the 1940s Davie established a reputation not just as a painter but as a Jazz musician and throughout his career these two aspects have intermingled, most obviously in his use of improvisation. He conceived of the present work in a similar spirit to his free-form Jazz, as an improvisation around a theme.

In Improvisations on a Chagall Theme the jumping off point was a painting by Chagall showing a two-headed bride in a wedding dress and long white veil, holding a bunch of flowers.

In a television interview at the time this work was exhibited in his retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery, Davie spoke of this painting as possessing 'a musical, lyrical movement between certain very subtle colour relationships. I actually sprinkled paint on various areas, which has a scintillating, luminous quality.recently, in an interview with Iain Gale, Davie talked about the symbols that became more apparent in this work from the mid-1960s: 'I realised you didn't have to have wild paint on a picture to make it a dynamic object. There is an incredible source of creative energy within oneself - an archetypal imagery within. Jung had the same idea: all sorts of symbols which one recognises without having to know what they mean. You find the same symbols in different cultures from all over the world from Australian Aborigines or Pictish tribes to Caribbean Indians' (Iain Gale, 'Tales of man, myth and magic', The Independent, 18 May 1993).