Salvador Dalí

In the mid-1930s, Dalí executed several paintings, as well as related drawings with treating the imagery or the horse, or horse and rider, on the theme of Le Chevalier de la mort. The present work is dominated by the kneeling man, surrounded by a spectre-like images of a horse and an enigmatic cloaked figure seen from the back. The central character originated in Dalí's The Enigma of William Tell of 1933, and appeared in several canvases of 1934, most notably in the figure of the Dutch seventeenth century painter Johannes Vermeer. In the present work, however, the historical or mythical references are replaced by the Hamlet-like image of the central figure, holding up what looks like a skull. A mysterious ceremony announcing death is played out in front of us, in a timeless, metaphysical landscape.

In a lecture given at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1934, the year he painted the present work, Dalí pronounced the following regarding his major themes and preoccupations at this time: 'To understand an aesthetic picture, training in appreciation is necessary, cultural and intellectual preparation. For Surrealism the only requisite is a receptive and intuitive human being [...] The subconscious has a symbolic language that is truly a universal language for it does not depend on education or culture or intelligence but speaks with the vocabulary of the great vital constants, sexual instinct, sense of death, physical notion of the enigma of space - these vital constants are universally echoed in every human being' (quoted in Salvador Dalí (exhibition catalogue), The Tate Gallery, London,1908,  pp. 15-16).

The first owner of the present work was the Countess Pecci-Blunt, who was a friend of Dalí's, and collected his works. She was one of the members of the celebrated Zodiac group, which consisted of twelve collectors who supported Dalí at this time. They each agreed to pay him a certain sum in exchange for either one large painting, or a small painting and two drawings. The twelve members of the group, all representing the elite of the Parisian collecting world of the 1930s, drew lots to decide a particular month in a year when each one of them would make a donation.