I nspired by the Surrealist patron Edward James, Rêverie de Monsieur James combines beguiling imagery with the unusual juxtapositions that so embody Magritte’s work. The painting continues the artist’s sustained interrogation of representation while exploring ideas that were central to the Surrealist movement and have continued to influence subsequent generations of artists.

Rêverie de Monsieur James is unique within Magritte’s oeuvre as the only oil painting to combine the hand and flower in this way. Unusually for Magritte, the title of the work is literal—the subject of this work was Edward James’ “dream.” As Magritte wrote when he sent James a color postcard of the painting in 1949: “I painted this picture during the Occupation in memory of the happier times when I met you. You probably remember that it was you who suggested the subject of this picture?” (quoted in D. Sylvester & S. Whitfield, op. cit., p. 306). In an earlier letter to James, Magritte mentioned that this idea, first realized in a drawing around 1941, was actually inspired by James’s commission of a fabric covered with flowers “some of which are women’s hands” (ibid., p. 306). Magritte had been introduced to the famed Surrealist patron by Salvador Dalí in 1937 and was immediately invited to stay at James’ Wimpole Street house in London. Over the following years he completed a number of commissions for the collector, including Le Principe du plaisir (see fig. 1), but among his first commissions was a triptych for James’ London home which included as one of the panels Le Modéle rouge III, showing a leather boot transforming into a human foot (see fig. 2). The metamorphosis in this image might be another precursor to the imagery of the present work; there is certainly a parallel in the relationship between boot/foot and hand/rose. James was evidently intrigued by the idea; this kind of metamorphosis and uncanny dislocation appear throughout the homes he designed in England. When he made what was arguably his greatest contribution to the Surrealist canon in the creation of his concrete otherworld at Xilitla in Mexico, he seems to have returned to these disembodied hands. By the side of one of the many pathways of Las Pozas emerge two monumental, disembodied hands (see fig. 3); the vegetation that now surrounds them seems to re-enact James’ original reverie, although whether that was intentional or the kind of “accident” so beloved by the Surrealists, is hard to say.

In the catalogue raisonné entry for Rêverie de Monsieur James, David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield suggest that James’ inspiration for the original idea may have come from a Hans Bellmer drawing (see fig. 4) that had been published in the 1938 Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme. The drawing is characteristic of Bellmer; executed with a precision that deliberately evokes the great draughtsmen of previous centuries, its exacting detail serves to emphasise the erotic tensions of subject (see fig. 5). Bellmer’s hands and flowers are erotic; the fingers pinch and caress the blooms, in the upper right a peach adds to the potent sensuality of the image. Magritte’s flowers (and hands) are more restrained, although there is a certain frisson in the delicacy of the touch which adds much to the painting’s appeal.

The choice of subject would also have appealed to Magritte as he sought a new direction in the 1940s. As the artist stated in his note to James, Rêverie de Monsieur James was painted during the Nazi occupation of Belgium—a period of some upheaval for the artist. Initially, when the Germans invaded in 1940, Magritte had fled to France. Although he remained there for only a few months, the impact of this personal displacement had an effect on his work. Michel Draguet writes: “His work shook off the hold of reality in favor of what Breton termed ‘a world ruled by love and the marvellous.”’ His references to reality—those ‘fragments of external reality borne along on the waves of the oneiric imagination’—took on an increasingly distant connection with the everyday as, while continuing to work, he probed his inner world and examined the way some of those close to him perceived his art” (M. Draguet, Magritte: His Work, His Museum, Paris, 2009, p. 108). In some of the canvases of this period Magritte adopted an entirely new aesthetic, which would come to be known as his “sunlight” painting; in others—as in the present work—he preserved the precise, illusionistic style of his pre-war work but chose a “delightful thing” as his subject. The pale pinks and azure sky of the present work certainly imply a certain joie de vivre and there is a flourishing romanticism in the way the hands present their roses, but as with all Magritte’s best work there is also a sense of the uncanny.

The combination of “objects” as a means of revealing their inner truth was an essential element of Magritte’s process; in some cases he juxtaposed two very different objects but he was equally intrigued by the idea that the combination of two related objects could create just as intense a poetic dynamic. In Rêverie de Monsieur James this combining is achieved through a process of metamorphosis. As a concept it had long been present in Magritte’s work; he wrote in a letter to Paul Nougé in 1927: “I have found a new potential inherent in things, their ability to become gradually something else, and object merging into an object other than itself…. This seems to me to be something quite different from a composite object, since there is no break between the two substances, and no limit” (quoted in David Sylvester, Sarah Whitfield & Michael Daeburn, eds., René Magritte. Catalogue raisonné, vol. I, London, 1992, pp. 245-46). In the present work Magritte seems to develop this idea; the hands do blossom from the plant in an example of one object becoming another but they also hold the flowers. The hands are the cause of the disconnect between bloom and bush; they both grow and cut. The power of the image lies in this rupture, the pull of these opposite desires; in truly Surrealist fashion, Magritte succeeds in transforming a simple and familiar relationship into something slightly disturbing and strange.

The combination of these two specific “objects” in this way serves to draw out certain characteristics. Both flowers and hands seem to exaggerate the sensuality of the other; Magritte presents us with a verdant bouquet, hand-flowers are in abundance and the tapered wrists and curving fingers seem to accentuate the pink folds of the roses. These disembodied hands are part of an important Surrealist trope that surfaces particularly in the sculpture and photography of the movement (see fig. 6). In the aftermath of the First World War, and for later Surrealists during the Second World War, the idea of disembodied limbs was powerful and could be employed to shock and unsettle the viewer. Equally, using part of a body out of context could emphasise certain inherent characteristics; Dora Maar’s Sans titre (Main-coquillage) underlines the sensuality of the hand, with only the faintest suggestion that it might, Hermit crab-like, pick up its shell and start crawling towards us (see fig. 7). For the Surrealists death and desire were tightly interwoven and the dissociation and dislocation of the human body was the perfect means through which to communicate this. It is an idea that has had an important legacy within twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and informs the work of a number of contemporary artists.

In both the history of its creation and its subject, Rêverie de Monsieur James plays an important part in Surrealist histories. A compelling and original composition, it has a simple beauty that belies the work’s conceptual complexity. It is this combination of simplicity and complexity that makes Magritte such an intriguing artist and positions him among the most influential and sought-after of all the Surrealist painters.