Bella was Chagall's muse.

ECONOMIST: Marc Chagall

But having read her wonderful evocation of Jewish Vitebsk, tsarist St Petersburg and modernist Paris, having lived as in a novel with the Hasidic families of Chagall and Bella Rosenfeld, his first wife, the reader will be hooked.

ECONOMIST: Marc Chagall

Bella's sudden death in 1944 left Chagall, who had no English, quite helpless.

ECONOMIST: Marc Chagall