Salvador Dalí

Mr. Montgomery M. Green & Mrs. Ann W. Green, Havre de Grace, Maryland (acquired directly from the artist)
Thence by descent

This work is in excellent original condition. The canvas is not lines. A light layer of varnish on the surface. A few pin dots of surface stains could easily be removed. There are some extremely thin and shallow craquelure in small isolated areas near the upper left and lower right corners. Under UV light no visible inpainting is apparent.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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A masterful portraitist since the earliest days of his career, Dalí imbued his likenesses with a distinctive lexicon and uncanny flair, creating a uniquely Surrealist strain of traditional portraiture. The subjects of Dalí’s society portraits from around 1940 onward ranged from municipal to Hollywood royalty, but most frequently featured the North American elite. Painted in 1963, Portrait de Madame Ann W. Green et de son fils Jonathan is among the most fascinating and ambitious such commissions, the origins of which offer an unprecedented insight into the artist’s peculiar process. A unique dialogue with the artist and his patrons gave rise to the present work, resulting in a deeply personal collaboration between the family and Dalí. Montgomery M. Green was a self-styled intellectual, gentleman farmer, patron of the arts and patriarch of a burgeoning family based in Havre de Grace, Maryland, who fiercely admired Dalí and took it upon himself to make contact with the artist and request a commission.

The Green family was fascinated by the space industry, and from their vacation residence in Cape Canaveral, Florida—known as the “Space Coast”—they witnessed at close range some of the spectacular early failures and eventual successes of the still secret missile launches off the coast. Against this backdrop Mr. Green commissioned Dalí to paint a double portrait of his wife, Ann, with their youngest son, Jonathan, who was born amidst these cosmic innovations. The Greens and Dalí became acquainted when they traveled to the artist’s home in Cadaqués, Spain, and quickly formed a cross-Atlantic friendship (see figs. 1 & 2). Photographs and preliminary drawings of Ann and Jonathan were created in Dalí’s Spanish study over the course of an extended visit in 1962, and the portrait was unveiled to the family in 1963 in a suite at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. John Rodgers Meigs Green, son and elder brother of the two sitters, recalls: “Dali and my father were both sparkling conversationalists who shared some eccentricities and some values. Both men liked to claim remembering their own births, and during their visits with each other in Spain and New York, they touched on the artistic themes of time, space, dreams, birth, motherhood, and love.”

Dressed in his father’s corduroy suit and donned with an embryonic helmet, Jonathan seemingly launches from his mother’s gaze within his space womb. The image of the mother and child, with the child suspended between ascent and descent, evokes imagery of Madonna and child. Dalí’s fascination with biblical and Renaissance imagery melded with the Green family’s own deep faith as evidenced by the angels below passing around a cross, as well as the fire from the launching spacecraft in the background forming into another cross. Dali incorporates the attenuated angels unique to his Surrealist canon within a deserted, dream-like locale, while including distinct markers of the era in which the work was created. As Ramón Gómez de la Serna wrote in his essay on Surrealism, “everything is deformed by its own ephemerality, and it is this which the surrealists show” (Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Dalí, New York, 1979, p. 28).

John Green further recollects: “In late 1963 as I tagged along with my father on a business trip to New York, I had the privilege of meeting Salvador Dalí myself at an opening of his work at a gallery in midtown Manhattan. My father and I were there when the artist strode into the gallery surrounded by a flock of aficionados. Dalí was wearing a black suit and carried a black walking stick. My father and Dalí immediately approached each other, and I was introduced and coaxed to get his autograph on my copy of the show’s catalogue, which I still have to this day over half a century later. Among other pleasantries after their greeting, my father informed Dalí that we had witnessed a night launch of a missile after the painting was created, and that by some atmospheric phenomenon, there had been a halo around the glowing missile’s flame as it ascended into the night sky, much like Dalí had depicted in our painting. Rolling his eyes wide and twirling his waxed mustache the artist replied: ‘What Dalí paints happens.’ Both men delighted in this statement of fact that doubled as a universal declaration.”