A blend of reality and fantasy characterized both his personal life and his artwork. In the Catalonian town of Figueras, near Barcelona, the artist Salvador Dali was born on May 11, 1904. His family encouraged his early interest in art; a room in the family home was the young artist’s first studio. In 1921, Dali enrolled at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. Although Dali did very well in his studies, he was expelled from school because of his eccentric dress and bizarre behavior.

It was at this time that Dali came under the influence of two forces that shaped his philosophy and art; Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious, and Surrealism’s unconscious dream imagery. It was under the influence of the surrealist movement that Dali’s style crystallized into the disturbing blend of precise realism and dreamlike fantasy that became his hallmark. Against desolate landscapes he painted unrelated and often bizarre objects. These pictures, described by Dali as “hand-painted unconscious dream forces”, were produced by a creative method he called “paranoiac-critical activity”. Dali’s most characteristic works also showed the influence of Italian Renaissance masters, the mannerists, and Italian metaphysical painters Carlo Carra and Giorgio de Chirico.