Portrait of Maria Carbona

When Salvador Dalí painted this portrait, he was an unruly fine arts student, indifferent to the manifesto of Surrealism published that same year in Paris. The son of a notary, he got himself expelled from what is now the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. His early work echoes the postwar “return to order” movement in its classicism: Dalí revered the Neoclassicism of Ingres. The sitter, Maria Carbona, was a young, cultured woman from Figueras, the artist’s birthplace in Catalonia. The artist painted her portrait on the back of a fragment of a still life he executed in 1924, which was later cut in four. This painting predates Dalí’s time as a major figure in the Surrealist movement, which he officially joined in 1929.