René Magritte

Private Collection, Belgium

Private Collection, Belgium (acquired from the above circa 1950)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, René Magritte, 1939, no. 30

Brussels, Galerie Dietrich, Exposition René Magritte, 1941, possibly no. 1

David Sylvester (ed.), Sarah Whitfield & Michael Raeburn, René Magritte. Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1994, vol. IV, no. 1137, illustrated p. 31 (with incorrect measurements)

Executed on white wove paper, not laid down, t-hinged to the mount in the upper corners. There is tape from a previous mounting along the reverse of all four edges. There are some very small creases in the lower left and lower right corners. Apart from some frame rubbing at the extreme edges and some light surface dirt, this work is in good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the blues have a slightly softer tonality in the original.
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L’Horizon is an enchanting image executed with exquisite detail. Magritte has depicted a towering plank of driftwood, rendered in faux-bois, stranded in otherwise empty seaside view. Illustrating his approach to artistic consciousness, it is a fine example of the artist’s Surrealist imagination, particularly his use of trompe-l'œil.The image of men in bowler hats is central to Magritte’s work. It has recently been suggested that he first affected this most conservative item of clothing when he visited England in 1938 to open an exhibition of his work at E. L. T. Mesens' London Gallery, where he was photographed wearing a bowler hat (fig. 1). The depiction of a man wearing a bowler hat first featured in the artist’s œuvre in the 1920s and remained one of his most frequently used and important motifs employed to portray a sense of the anxiety of the Everyman.

According to the catalogue raisonné entry for this work, L’Horizon is the first rendition of this composition, which Magritte would later revisit in an oil painting of 1950. Alongside oil paint, gouache was Magritte’s favoured medium and particularly important compositions were executed in both media. The artist’s use of gouache facilitated his intricate style of representation but also introduced a brighter tone to his work. Siegfried Gohr, discussing the importance of the artist’s gouaches, wrote that ‘the coloured works on paper reveal the brilliant talent of Magritte the painter. Even though he repeatedly denied his ‘artistry’, belittling the traditional habitus of the virtuoso artist genius and emphasizing instead the artist’s intellectual work, his gouaches in particular reveal how masterfully he was able to apply his extraordinary gift of visualising his pictorial ideas’ (S. Gohr, Magritte: Attempting the Impossible, New York, 2009, pp. 77-78). In comparison to his oil paintings which often utilised the material’s natural inclination to depth and atmospheric effects, gouache depicts its subject in light-filled hues and crystalline clarity.