Retrato (Portrait)

Salvador Dalí held his first solo show at Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona in 1925, aged just twenty-one, and prior to his first trip to Paris. In the exhibition he displayed seventeen oil paintings and five drawings, in a combination of Cubist and realist works, with the latter including most notably the series of portraits he painted, between Figueras and Cadaqués, of his family, particularly his sister Anna Maria, who would be central to six of the seventeen paintings.
Retrato (Portrait), a Noucentista and Mediterranean composition, illustrated the cover of the Dalmau exhibition catalogue. It was previously displayed at the Primera Exposición de la Sociedad de Artistas Ibéricos (The First Exhibition of the Society of Iberian Artists) in May 1925 in Madrid, and later retouched by the artist, resulting in the version we see today. In her brother’s biography, published in 1949, Anna Maria recalled the long sessions sitting as a model: “The portraits my brother painted of me in that period are countless, and many were simply studies of the ringlets and always with a shoulder exposed. He painted patiently and tirelessly, and I never tired of posing for him; I’ve never become bored of staying still and quiet”. 

Raúl Martínez Arranz