''Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach'' (1938) is a painting by the Spanish surrealist

Salvador Dalí Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol (; ; ; 11 May 190423 January 1989) was a Spanish Surrealism, surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarr ...

. This work belongs to a group of paintings by Dalí that instantiate an optical illusion called the double, multiple, or

ambiguous image Ambiguous images or reversible figures are visual forms that create ambiguity by exploiting graphical similarities and other properties of visual system interpretation between two or more distinct image forms. These are famous for inducing the ...

. The painting is dominated by a depiction of brown-skinned pears with the

eponymous An eponym is a person, a place, or a thing after whom or which someone or something is, or is believed to be, named. The adjectives which are derived from the word eponym include ''eponymous'' and ''eponymic''. Usage of the word The term ''epon ...

footed silver fruit bowl, which somewhat resembles a

wine glass A wine glass is a type of glass that is used to drink and taste wine. Most wine glasses are stemware (goblets), i.e., they are composed of three parts: the bowl, stem, and foot. Shapes The effect of glass shape on the taste of wine has not been ...

(specifically a

coupe A coupe or coupé (, ) is a passenger car with a sloping or truncated rear roofline and two doors. The term ''coupé'' was first applied to horse-drawn carriages for two passengers without rear-facing seats. It comes from the French past parti ...

). A deliberately created

optical illusion Within visual perception, an optical illusion (also called a visual illusion) is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual perception, percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide v ...

of the eponymous human face occupies the same space as the dish; the fruits suggest wavy hair, the dish's bowl becomes the forehead, the stem of the dish serves as the bridge of the nose, and the dish's foot doubles as the chin. The eyes of the large face, however, are formed by ''background'' objects lying on the sand at the edge of the strand — deeper in the image — rather than sharing form with the fruit dish. The face's right eye is what appears to be a shell, and the face's left eye a piece of a ship or boat. A similar face reappears other paintings by Dalí, including ''The Endless Enigma.'' In the middle ground of the scene, where the sand of the beach appears to end, a small version of the fruit dish can be seen on the ground with several pears scattered near it, all to the same scale as the only embodied human figures depicted in the painting. A second iteration of the face appears further in the distance, just to the right of the elbow of the nude male figure; in the same area of the painting, two dogs are playing along a path in the distance. One of those dogs is itself an echo of the immense, illusionary figure of a dog which stretches from the left to the right margin of the painting, with the dog's collar formed by a multi-arched bridge or aqueduct in the landscape beyond. This repetition of shapes is a frequent motif in Dalí's surrealist works. ''Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach'' is part of the Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection of the

Wadsworth Atheneum The Wadsworth Atheneum is an art museum in Hartford, Connecticut. The Wadsworth is noted for its collections of European Baroque art, ancient Egyptian and Classical bronzes, French and American Impressionist paintings, Hudson River School lands ...

Museum of Art in

Hartford, Connecticut Hartford is the capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It was the seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960. It is the core city in the Greater Hartford metropolitan area. Census estimates since the ...

References

External links

Large image viewable via the online gift shop of the Wadsworth Atheneum
Paintings by Salvador Dalí Surrealist paintings 1938 paintings Dogs in art {{modern-art-stub