Maternité was an early work, done while Chagall was finishing up his etchings for the Dead Souls and before he began work on his etchings for The Fables of La Fontaine. The story begins with a young woman being shunned by the whole village because she had given birth to a child and left its dead body in a deserted place. After an investigation she is not charged with a crime but she is shamed by her neighbors. The first plate shows her with a policeman who is escorting her through her village: she is being mocked, shunned, and the subject of scandal. The second shows her giving birth alone, lying on the floor next to a naked infant showing no signs of life. The third plate shows a scene of tremendous violence as her father beats her with a chair beneath a wildly swinging chandelier. The fourth plate shows her in bed with a young man, and the fifth plate shows him climbing into her bedroom through an open window. In short, we begin at the end and end at the chronological beginning of the events of the narrative.

The etchings were published in a book published by Sans Pareil, a small avant-garde French publisher, in 1926. There were 960 copies: 765 examples on Velin Lamufa de Voiron (of which ours is one), 80 on Dutch laid paper, 60 on Dutch laid paper with a separate suite of the etchings, 20 reserved for the Amis du Sans Pareil with two separate suites, one on Japon and one on vellum, and 35 on Japon, also with two separate suites. All told, there were 1130 impressions of each etching on Japon or Butten papers.

Bibliography: Patrick Cramer, Marc Chagall: The Illustrated Books (Geneva: Patrick Cramer Publisher, 1995); E. W. Kornfeld, Verzeichnis der Kupferstiche, Radierungen und Holzschnitte: Band I: Werke 11922-1966 (Bern: Verlag Kornfeld und Klipstein, 1970); Charles Sorlier, Le Livre des Livres / The Illustrated Books (Monte Carlo: Editions André Sauret, 1990). Cramer and Kornfeld illustrate all five of the etchings and Sorlier illustrates two.