René Magritte

Georges Hugnet, Paris (acquired by 1961)

Galerie André Petit, Paris

Daniel Filipacchi, Paris

Acquired from the above by 1968 by the present owner

London, Obelisk Gallery, Magritte: Paintings, Drawings, Gouaches, 1961, no. 25, p. 23 

New York, Byron Gallery, René Magritte, 1968, no. 12, p. 37, illustrated (catalogued as oil on canvas) 

Southampton, The Parrish Art Museum, René Magritte: Poetic Images, 1979, no. 14, illustrated

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, 1999, vol. I, no. 135, p. 199, illustrated in color

Paris, Jeu de Paume, Magritte: The Use of Painting, 2003, p. 133, illustrated in color

The Arts Review, London, 23 September-7 October 1961, p. 2 

Sarane Alexandrian, Dictionnaire de la peinture surréaliste, Paris, 1973, p. 36, illustrated in color

Jacques Baron, Anthologie plastique du surréalisme, Paris, 1980, p. 165, illustrated in color

René Passeron, René Magritte, New York, 1980, pp. 20-21, illustrated in color (with incorrect dimensions)

David Sylvester, ed., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. IV, London, 1994, no. 1178, p. 53, illustrated

Siegfried Gohr, Magritte: Attempting the Impossible, no. 130, p. 84, illustrated in color

Throughout René Magritte’s career, few images have held such enduring fascination as Le Jockey perdu. First conceived in 1926, the motif of a solitary rider advancing through a forest of towering bilboquets marked the artist’s definitive break from his early Cubist- and commercially-inspired works. Magritte himself later described the initial composition in oil as his “premier tableau”—his first true Surrealist painting, one born purely of a “mysterious feeling” rather than aesthetic intention. Indeed the horse and jockey motif would herald a new direction in Magritte’s artistry, proving the first theme to be revisited in his oeuvre–a practice which would come to define much of the artist’s process. Unique among the various iterations, the present gouache from 1942 presents one of the largest works on paper and the only example of Le Jockey perdu to feature a wintry landscape.

The 1926 oil version of Le Jockey perdu was celebrated among Magritte’s Belgian contemporaries as a revelation. Within its theatrical framing, where curtains part to reveal a dreamlike stage, motion and stillness, reality and invention collide. It was, as David Sylvester observed, “seen from the very start as something special—and not just by the artist,” inaugurating the enduring practice of deliberately reimagining his own images to uncover new meanings. In the same year, Magritte also produced two papiers collés, each with a similarly dark and foreboding atmosphere, and a pencil drawing of the subject.

The composition encapsulated Magritte’s discovery of a poetic tension between the known and the unknowable, a concept shaped by his early encounter with Giorgio de Chirico’s Le Chant d’amour, and perhaps most evidently by Paolo Uccello’s Hunt in the Forest. Uccello’s frieze-like procession of horsemen disappearing into a dense forest, noted by Breton in the Manifeste du Surréalisme as an example of visionary composition, resonates in Magritte’s own image: the verticality of the trees, the rhythmic perspective and the theatrical sense of space form a bridge between order and mystery. Belgian Surrealist Camille Goemans described the lost jockey as a metaphor for the artist’s bold new direction, a vision of “René Magritte hurtling recklessly into the void.” As Sarah Whitfield writes, “the image gave [writers like Goemans] compelling reason to do so since it brings to mind one of the most celebrated poetic metaphors, the opening lines of Dante's Divine Comedy which describe man's arduous and bewildering journey through life: 'Midway life's journey I was made aware/ That I had strayed into a dark forest/ And the right path appeared not anywhere'” (Exh. Cat., London, South Bank Centre (and traveling), Magritte, 1992, n.p.).

More than fifteen years later, in advance of the first monograph on his work, Magritte returned to Le Jockey perdu, producing in 1942 another oil composition and two gouaches, each with a distinct atmospheric charge. These wartime reprises translated the symbolist energy of the 1926 painting into works of crystalline clarity and compositional balance, with the gouaches in particular showcasing the exquisite draftsmanship for which Magritte would become renowned. While one gouache from this period (Sylvester 1180) echoes the 1942 oil, positioning the horse and jockey at the center of a dense bilboquet forest surrounded by walls, the present work offers one of the most singular settings of all the Jockey perdu series.

Here, the familiar scene is reimagined in winter: the verdant forest gives way to a frozen colonnade of leafless trees, the pale ground luminous beneath the rider’s suspended stride. Stripped of the overt theatricality of many related works, the winter landscape heightens the essential Surrealist tension between the known and the imagined and brings into sharp relief the paradox of movement and immobility.

Executed in gouache—a medium affording a directness and delicacy not readily available in oil—the present composition attains a new atmosphere of stillness and introspection. In revisiting Le Jockey perdu, Magritte was not merely repeating a successful motif but reengaging with the very moment of revelation that had defined his artistic identity decades earlier.The French Dada and Surrealist artist and writer Georges Hugnet, was the first known owner of the present work and likely acquired it directly from Magritte. Hugnet is perhaps best known for his book-making and publishing endeavors, including among other collaborations, a series of prints and postcards such as La Solution de rébus which featured the designs of Magritte with photography by Dora Maar. Following Hugnet’s early ownership, Le Jockey perdu has belonged to the same private collection since 1968.