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Lot Essay
I have found a new potential inherent in things, their ability to become gradually something else, and object merging into an object other than itself…. This seems to me to be something quite different from a composite object, since there is no break between the two substances, and no limit. —— René Magritte
In René Magritte’s Rêverie de Monsieur James, elegant hands bloom like arum lilies from a rose bush, each daintily holding a pink rose, before an idyllic backdrop of a seascape. In this unusual scene, plant metamorphoses into human, before growing back into flora. The seven hands are balletic, the stem of the roses delicately held between the thumb and index finger, though the roses emerge from various points of the hand, some through the palm, others through the forefinger, and others through the thumb. With their graceful positioning, and the naturalistic growth of the wrist from the green branches of the rose bush, the hands fan out beneath the rose petals like sepals.
The title of the present work Rêverie de Monsieur James is a reference to Edward James, the Surrealist poet and collector, who Magritte had first met in 1936. An English aristocrat, James was a pivotal influence on the Surrealist movement – a key patron of Salvador Dalí, Leonor Fini, and Leonora Carrington, as well as Magritte. James is perhaps best remembered for his ambitious and opulent renovation of Monkton House, a traditional English country house on his extensive West Dean estate in Sussex, which he transformed into an extraordinary Surrealist dreamscape. James’ pioneering approaches to interior design extended to his London townhouse, 35 Wimpole Street, too, and following James and Magritte’s initial meeting in Paris, the eccentric collector wrote to the artist in January 1937, inviting him to stay at his English residencies. Magritte arrived in London that spring, and during his sojourn he was commissioned by James to paint three works for the ballroom at Wimpole Street - Le modèle rouge (Sylvester, vol. II, no. 428; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam), La jeunesse illustrée (Sylvester, vol. II, no. 429; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam), and Auseuil de la liberté (Sylvester, vol. II, no. 430; The Art Institute of Chicago). These paintings were to be placed behind the two-way mirrors in the ballroom, so that it was only when the lights behind the looking-glasses were switched on that the paintings would be visible.
James was evidently pleased by this first commission from Magritte, and requested two more paintings, one a portrait of himself, before Magritte returned to Belgium. James was always eager to work creatively with the artists, sharing ideas or discussing concepts, and he and Magritte had done so during the artist’s February and March visit. In a letter to James from June 1937, Magritte wrote that he had made a preliminary study of a man ‘whose head is a light,’ and that since the final painting would belong to James, what did James think about his person being recognisable in it (Letter from Magritte to James, 27 June 1937). Magritte went on to outline the specific set up James must be photographed in, should he like the idea, and James subsequently arranged for the artist Man Ray to take the photographs. The finished composition, Le principe du plaisir (Sylvester, vol. II, no. 443; Private collection), depicts James’ torso and arms, seated behind a table, with a gleaming nimbus of light shining in the place of his head. It is clear from their letters that the artist and James must have discussed the concept and the composition, and this kind of creative collaboration between the two continued in Rêverie de Monsieur James.
I painted this picture during the Occupation in memory of the happier times when I met you. You probably remember that it was you who suggested the subject of this picture? —— Letter from Magritte to James, 6 January 1949
Indeed, Magritte’s letters to James indicate the influence of the Englishman on the present work. In January 1949, six years after the completion of Rêverie de Monsieur James, the artist sent James a colour postcard of the work, which has been made by Maison Berger – Magritte’s material shop run by his sister-in-law – on which he wrote ‘I painted this picture during the Occupation in memory of the happier times when I met you. You probably remember that it was you who suggested the subject of this picture?’ (Letter from Magritte to James, 6 January 1949). The artist’s fondness for James shines through his writing, and this is not the first occasion on which Magritte credits James with inspiring the flowers and female hands motif. In a letter from January 1941, the artist wrote about a recent exhibition of his works at the Galerie Dietrich in Brussels, telling James that one of the drawings featured in the show ‘uses an idea you had carried out in London by a fabric designer: there are flowers, some of which are women’s hands’ (Letter from Magritte to James, 22 January 1941).
David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield suggested that James perhaps took inspiration for the motif from a Hans Bellmer drawing published in the 1938 Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, where female hands erotically stroke an orchid-like plant. Bellmer’s hands and flowers are erotic; the fingers pinch and caress the blooms, in the upper right a peach adds to the potent sensuality of the image. Magritte’s flowers (and hands) are more restrained, although there is a certain frisson in the delicacy of the touch which adds much to the painting’s appeal.
The combination of “objects” as a means of revealing their inner truth was an essential element of Magritte’s process; in some cases he juxtaposed two very different objects but he was equally intrigued by the idea that the combination of two related objects could create just as intense a poetic dynamic. In Rêverie de Monsieur James this combining is achieved through a process of metamorphosis. As a concept it had long been present in Magritte’s work; he wrote in a letter to Paul Nougé in 1927: “I have found a new potential inherent in things, their ability to become gradually something else, and object merging into an object other than itself…. This seems to me to be something quite different from a composite object, since there is no break between the two substances, and no limit” (quoted in David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield eds., René Magritte. Catalogue raisonné, vol. I, London, 1992, pp. 245-46). In the present work Magritte seems to develop this idea; the hands do blossom from the plant in an example of one object becoming another but they also hold the flowers. The hands are the cause of the disconnect between bloom and bush; they both grow and cut. The power of the image lies in this rupture, the pull of these opposite desires; in truly Surrealist fashion, Magritte succeeds in transforming a simple and familiar relationship into something slightly disturbing and strange.
The imagery of Rêverie de Monsieur James, of women’s wrists interlaced with the stems and briars of roses as their hands hold and offer the blooms, was used by the artist for one of his commercial endeavours too. In the early 1940s, sometime between 1942 and 1944, Magritte created the design for soap packaging for the Belgian brand ‘Provence, Produits pour Beauté,’ which was based in Brussels. The gouache and watercolour studies for the design depict the hands emerging between the plant more naturalistically, the extent to which they have grown from the stems themselves is left more ambiguous than in the present work, where their burgeoning flourishing transfixes and beguiles the viewer.
The blissful romanticism inherent in Rêverie de Monsieur James is reflective of Magritte’s output from the years of Nazi Occupation in Belgium, where the artist felt that a new visual idiom was required to adequately respond to the horrors of the conflict that surrounded him. In some of his paintings he adopted a new, Impressionistic style of brushwork which he called Le Surréalisme en plein soleil, while in others – like the present work – he turned to enchanting, and delightful subject matters, and preserved his much-admired illusionistic style of painting from his pre-war works. Beauty was his counter-offensive to the turbulence of war.
In both the history of its creation and its subject, Rêverie de Monsieur James plays an important part in Surrealist histories. A compelling and original composition, it has a simple beauty that belies the work’s conceptual complexity. It is this combination of simplicity and complexity that makes Magritte such an intriguing artist and positions him among the most influential and sought-after of all the Surrealist painters.
In René Magritte’s Rêverie de Monsieur James, elegant hands bloom like arum lilies from a rose bush, each daintily holding a pink rose, before an idyllic backdrop of a seascape. In this unusual scene, plant metamorphoses into human, before growing back into flora. The seven hands are balletic, the stem of the roses delicately held between the thumb and index finger, though the roses emerge from various points of the hand, some through the palm, others through the forefinger, and others through the thumb. With their graceful positioning, and the naturalistic growth of the wrist from the green branches of the rose bush, the hands fan out beneath the rose petals like sepals.
The title of the present work Rêverie de Monsieur James is a reference to Edward James, the Surrealist poet and collector, who Magritte had first met in 1936. An English aristocrat, James was a pivotal influence on the Surrealist movement – a key patron of Salvador Dalí, Leonor Fini, and Leonora Carrington, as well as Magritte. James is perhaps best remembered for his ambitious and opulent renovation of Monkton House, a traditional English country house on his extensive West Dean estate in Sussex, which he transformed into an extraordinary Surrealist dreamscape. James’ pioneering approaches to interior design extended to his London townhouse, 35 Wimpole Street, too, and following James and Magritte’s initial meeting in Paris, the eccentric collector wrote to the artist in January 1937, inviting him to stay at his English residencies. Magritte arrived in London that spring, and during his sojourn he was commissioned by James to paint three works for the ballroom at Wimpole Street - Le modèle rouge (Sylvester, vol. II, no. 428; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam), La jeunesse illustrée (Sylvester, vol. II, no. 429; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam), and Auseuil de la liberté (Sylvester, vol. II, no. 430; The Art Institute of Chicago). These paintings were to be placed behind the two-way mirrors in the ballroom, so that it was only when the lights behind the looking-glasses were switched on that the paintings would be visible.
James was evidently pleased by this first commission from Magritte, and requested two more paintings, one a portrait of himself, before Magritte returned to Belgium. James was always eager to work creatively with the artists, sharing ideas or discussing concepts, and he and Magritte had done so during the artist’s February and March visit. In a letter to James from June 1937, Magritte wrote that he had made a preliminary study of a man ‘whose head is a light,’ and that since the final painting would belong to James, what did James think about his person being recognisable in it (Letter from Magritte to James, 27 June 1937). Magritte went on to outline the specific set up James must be photographed in, should he like the idea, and James subsequently arranged for the artist Man Ray to take the photographs. The finished composition, Le principe du plaisir (Sylvester, vol. II, no. 443; Private collection), depicts James’ torso and arms, seated behind a table, with a gleaming nimbus of light shining in the place of his head. It is clear from their letters that the artist and James must have discussed the concept and the composition, and this kind of creative collaboration between the two continued in Rêverie de Monsieur James.
I painted this picture during the Occupation in memory of the happier times when I met you. You probably remember that it was you who suggested the subject of this picture? —— Letter from Magritte to James, 6 January 1949
Indeed, Magritte’s letters to James indicate the influence of the Englishman on the present work. In January 1949, six years after the completion of Rêverie de Monsieur James, the artist sent James a colour postcard of the work, which has been made by Maison Berger – Magritte’s material shop run by his sister-in-law – on which he wrote ‘I painted this picture during the Occupation in memory of the happier times when I met you. You probably remember that it was you who suggested the subject of this picture?’ (Letter from Magritte to James, 6 January 1949). The artist’s fondness for James shines through his writing, and this is not the first occasion on which Magritte credits James with inspiring the flowers and female hands motif. In a letter from January 1941, the artist wrote about a recent exhibition of his works at the Galerie Dietrich in Brussels, telling James that one of the drawings featured in the show ‘uses an idea you had carried out in London by a fabric designer: there are flowers, some of which are women’s hands’ (Letter from Magritte to James, 22 January 1941).
David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield suggested that James perhaps took inspiration for the motif from a Hans Bellmer drawing published in the 1938 Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, where female hands erotically stroke an orchid-like plant. Bellmer’s hands and flowers are erotic; the fingers pinch and caress the blooms, in the upper right a peach adds to the potent sensuality of the image. Magritte’s flowers (and hands) are more restrained, although there is a certain frisson in the delicacy of the touch which adds much to the painting’s appeal.
The combination of “objects” as a means of revealing their inner truth was an essential element of Magritte’s process; in some cases he juxtaposed two very different objects but he was equally intrigued by the idea that the combination of two related objects could create just as intense a poetic dynamic. In Rêverie de Monsieur James this combining is achieved through a process of metamorphosis. As a concept it had long been present in Magritte’s work; he wrote in a letter to Paul Nougé in 1927: “I have found a new potential inherent in things, their ability to become gradually something else, and object merging into an object other than itself…. This seems to me to be something quite different from a composite object, since there is no break between the two substances, and no limit” (quoted in David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield eds., René Magritte. Catalogue raisonné, vol. I, London, 1992, pp. 245-46). In the present work Magritte seems to develop this idea; the hands do blossom from the plant in an example of one object becoming another but they also hold the flowers. The hands are the cause of the disconnect between bloom and bush; they both grow and cut. The power of the image lies in this rupture, the pull of these opposite desires; in truly Surrealist fashion, Magritte succeeds in transforming a simple and familiar relationship into something slightly disturbing and strange.
The imagery of Rêverie de Monsieur James, of women’s wrists interlaced with the stems and briars of roses as their hands hold and offer the blooms, was used by the artist for one of his commercial endeavours too. In the early 1940s, sometime between 1942 and 1944, Magritte created the design for soap packaging for the Belgian brand ‘Provence, Produits pour Beauté,’ which was based in Brussels. The gouache and watercolour studies for the design depict the hands emerging between the plant more naturalistically, the extent to which they have grown from the stems themselves is left more ambiguous than in the present work, where their burgeoning flourishing transfixes and beguiles the viewer.
The blissful romanticism inherent in Rêverie de Monsieur James is reflective of Magritte’s output from the years of Nazi Occupation in Belgium, where the artist felt that a new visual idiom was required to adequately respond to the horrors of the conflict that surrounded him. In some of his paintings he adopted a new, Impressionistic style of brushwork which he called Le Surréalisme en plein soleil, while in others – like the present work – he turned to enchanting, and delightful subject matters, and preserved his much-admired illusionistic style of painting from his pre-war works. Beauty was his counter-offensive to the turbulence of war.
In both the history of its creation and its subject, Rêverie de Monsieur James plays an important part in Surrealist histories. A compelling and original composition, it has a simple beauty that belies the work’s conceptual complexity. It is this combination of simplicity and complexity that makes Magritte such an intriguing artist and positions him among the most influential and sought-after of all the Surrealist painters.