![Salvador Dali - La Femme Poisson [1930]](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7570/15539868927_09173ec8fc_o.jpg)
La femme poisson, painted in 1930, reflects Dalí’s boundless imagination and exquisite technical virtuosity. Dating from his most important period and painted the year before his magnificent La persistence de la mémoire, the present painting is endowed with the same idiosyncratic iconography which defined the artist’s finest works. These include the clock, the desert landscape and the anthropomorphised assemblage, the female profile on a pedestal, the shoe and the cypress, all rendered with pristine draughtsmanship and luminous brushwork. Dalí considered his work to be a product of his paranoid delusions and drew upon the writing of Freud for creative inspiration. This picture is known as one of the artist's double-image compositions, in which a singular form is constructed from an assemblage of unrelated objects. Much in the manner of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's portraits from the 16th century, Dalí has achieved a similar result by melding flesh-coloured fish-forms to create the profile of a woman.
[Sotheby’s, New York - Oil on canvas, 26.7 x 19 cm]