Figura en una finestra (Figure at the Window)

For a young Salvador Dalí, the beginnings of his career in the 1920s were a time of investigation. Before embarking on his Surrealist period in 1927, the artist experimented with two of the predominant styles of the time, Cubism and Realism, taking references from magazines such as Valori Plastici, from Italy, and the French publication L’Esprit Nouveau. Notable among his realist works is the series of portraits of his family that he produced between Figueras and Cadaqués, particularly of his sister Anna Maria, the focal point of six of the seventeen paintings Dalí displayed at his first solo show at Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona in 1925.
Figura en una finestra (Figure at the Window) is perhaps the most important of the Anna Maria paintings; a balanced, classicist and Mediterranean composition indebted to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Pablo Picasso, whereby Dalí depicts his sister with her back turned as she looks out of the window and contemplates the landscape of the bay of Cadaqués. A landscape that recalls, in its stillness and horizontality, and even in its positioning, that which is represented in Andrea Mantegna’s Death of the Virgin, which Dalí had observed at the Museo del Prado and which he would also use — albeit only in the reference to the clouds — in his portrait of Luis Buñuel. 

Raúl Martínez Arranz