René Magritte

The present work was drawn in 1936, at the time when Magritte was enjoying an ever wider recognition, with his first one-man show opening at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, and a one-man exhibition held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. In Cheval, le passager du Transatlantique, he combines some of his favourite images – a horse, seen here facing an enigmatic human figure, possibly a circus performer, and a bell that appears at the end of a brick wall. The horse first appeared in Magritte’s celebrated image of Le Jockey perdu, first executed in 1926 both as an oil painting and a papier-collé. Whilst in Le Jockey perdu the horse is presented as an elegant animal galloping through an imaginary landscape, in the present work Magritte shows it with a violent surrealist twist, drawing only the front part if its body, with a tail attached to the truncated body.

The first owners of this work were Louis Scutenaire and his wife Irène Hamoir. Scutenaire (1905-1987) was a Belgian poet closely associated with the group of Belgian Surrealists, and a great friend of Magritte, whom he considered to be the best Surrealist artist. Scutenaire’s own communist and anarchist leanings brought him close to the Surrealists, and he participated in their activities from 1927, his contribution focusing primarily on writing poems and introductions to exhibition catalogues. His wife Irène Hamoir was a writer and poet in her own right, and through their acquaintance with the Surrealists, the couple acquired a large number of their works. On Hamoir’s death in 1994, a number of Magritte’s paintings were bequeathed to the Musée d’Art Moderne in Brussels.