When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is. I'm not crazy about those cocks and asses and flying violinists and all the folklore, but his canvasses are really painted, not just thrown together. Some of the last thing's he's done in Vence [where Matisse painted his late frescos in the chapel] convince me that there's never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has.

In a writing of Francoise Gilot; as quoted in Marc Chagall, – a Biography, by Sidney Alexander, Cassell, London, 1978, p. 440