Artist: Salvador Dalí
Title: La Chêne et la Roseau (The Oak and the Reed), from Le Bestiaire de La Fontaine Suite
Year created: 1974
Medium: Original Engraving with Color Pochoir, on Auvergne Paper
Signed by the artist
Edition: XLVIII/LXII (48/62) Hand-Signed & Numbered Limited Edition
Height (inches): 43.5
Width (inches): 36
This piece is framed.
Includes a certificate of authenticity.
Description of piece: This rare original engraving, La Chêne et la Roseau (The Oak and the Reed), by Salvador Dalí is one of only 62 pieces created on Auvergne paper for Dalí. With color additions by pochoir application, the work is hand-signed and numbered XLVIII/LXII (48/62), from the limited edition of 62 Roman-numeraled pieces on Auvergne. La Chêne et la Roseau is from Dalí's Le Bestiaire de La Fontaine Suite.
The artwork is numbered in the lower left margin directly below the image area. In the right lower margin Dali has hand-signed the work, in pencil, with an especially large and prominent signature.
Delicately colored in a pale palette of natural tones, the work is titled for its predominant figures: an Oak Tree, (here, transforming by Dali into a surrealistic human figure with root-like anatomy and branching roots) and a deftly drawn botanical image of Reed plants, perhaps resembling cattails. Iconic Dali figures, to the right of the oak-human figure, complete the composition: a running man, an overturning chariot, a galloping horse.
The artwork comes custom framed and ready for display in an ornately carved vintage frame of golden wood, museum plexiglas, custom white linen mat, and with a matching golden wood fillet. Measuring 43.5" in height x 36" width, and with an image area measuring 22.25" height x 15.25" width, La Chêne et la Roseau was published by Ateliers Rigal, France. The work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
Referenced in Dalí expert Albert Field's authoritative Official Catalog of The Graphic Works of Salvador Dalí, Reference: 75-1 K, page 92, it is valued at $8,000 in the 2015 edition of The Print Price Guide to the Graphic Works of Salvador Dalí, by Bruce Hochman OS. The reverse of the framed artwork bears a signed letter from Albert Field, written in gratitude as he was writing the first edition of his landmark book.
Artist bio: Salvador Dalí, born Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, (1904-1989) was a prominent artist born in Figueres, Spain, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, sixteen miles from the French border, in Catalonia. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media, and he is best known for his surrealist work, including his most well-known painting, The Persistence of Memory. Highly imaginative, Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to an ancestry of descent from the medieval Moors. His individualistic nature and resistance to conformity made waves, including among his colleagues. In 1934, when Dalí was subjected to a "trial", in which he was formally expelled from the Surrealist group, Dalí retorted, "le Surrealisme c'est moi": "I myself am surrealism".
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