Two decades ago, French border patrol officials stopped a vehicle attempting to cross into Switzerland. The vehicle contained contraband—artworks unauthorized to leave France—including an etching by Russian artist Marc Chagall.

The perpetrators were arrested and fined, and the art was confiscated. In time, the pieces were all but forgotten in customs, reports Adam Sage for the Times of London.

Now, Chagall’s 1924 etching, titled L’Acrobate Au Violon, or Acrobat with Violin, has been released from limbo. French officials rediscovered the piece a few years ago, and they recently gave it to the Besançon Museum of Fine Arts and Archeology in eastern France, near the Swiss border. The etching will be displayed this fall.

Besançon Museum of Fine Arts Showcasing its 1st work by Marc Chagall

— La Gazette Drouot – International (@Gazette_Inter) July 21, 2026

“The Acrobat with the Violin” (1924), seized in 2006 following an attempt to illegally export it to Switzerland, was donated to the museum by the Franche-Comté Regional Customs Office. pic.twitter.com/RcWgGZTfcm

Chagall was born Moyshe Segal, in 1887, to a devout Jewish family in what’s now Belarus. He studied art in St. Petersburg, then moved to Paris, where he Frenchified his name. There, “I discovered light, color, liberty, sunshine and a joy for life,” the artist later recalled. He slowly rose to prominence within the Parisian Salons.

Chagall’s paintings were bold, colorful and mystical. He mixed Jewish tradition, Russian folk and Western European styles to make strange, collage-like works like I and the Village (1911) and Paris Through the Window (1913). The latter depicts—in smudgy bright colors and dark lines—a cat with a humanoid expression, a man with two faces and an upside-down train, among other oddities.

The Chagall etching recently freed from customs is similarly surreal. The main character wears a hat and shorts and stands on one foot atop an upright violin. Over his arm drapes a much smaller person. And below that person is an upside-down chicken, floating mid-air. Beside the violin is an acrobatic goat-ish animal standing on its front legs, which end in human hands.

The etching’s dreamlike style, detached from reality, makes it easily recognizable as Chagall’s work, as Besançon Museum curator Maël Vandewalle tells French broadcaster Ici’s Romane Salch. Vandewalle helped authenticate the work and says the violin and acrobat are common motifs in Chagall’s oeuvre.

Besançon’s regional director of customs tells Ici that the artwork was seized in 2006, when police discovered its transporters didn’t have documents to take it out of France. During the same bust, they confiscated a 1959 drawing by artist Ossip Zadkine—a contemporary of Chagall—depicting a man playing guitar. The Zadkine drawing has been donated to the Musée Zadkine in Paris.

Fun fact: Chagall’s range of skills

Chagall worked in many media, in addition to painting and engraving. In 1945, he designed the backdrops and costumes for a production of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird in New York. He designed stained glass windows for the Cathedral of Metz in France, the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem and the United Nations building in New York.

There are 150 copies of the Chagall etching, meaning it’s probably worth a few thousand euros, reports Artnet’s Min Chen. It marks an important milestone for the Besançon Museum.

“The customs service has really honored us,” Besançon mayor Ludovic Fagaut tells the Times. “It’s the first Marc Chagall work to enter the museum.”