Winter

Guiseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) was an Italian artist who worked at the court of the Austrian emperors in the sixteenth century, specialising in painting portrait heads and allegorical figures made from flowers, fruits, vegetables, fish and books. His work was much copied by his contemporaries and also well into the seventeenth century. In 1937 some of these later copies were reproduced in Minotaure, renewing interest in Arcimboldo's work amongst the Surrealists. Man Ray certainly owned one of these later imitations, a painting after Arcimboldo's Winter (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), which itself inspired the present painting.