Artist: Salvador Dalí
Title: The Rock (The Source), from the Our Historical Heritage portfolio
Year created: 1975
Medium: Original Etching with Color Pochoir on Watermarked Arches Paper
Signed by the artist
Edition: 342/400 Signed & Numbered Limited Edition on Watermarked Arches Paper
Height (inches): 25.75
Width (inches): 19.75
This piece is unframed.
Includes a certificate of authenticity.
This original Salvador Dalí etching, The Rock (The Source), is hand-signed and numbered 342, from the limited edition tirage of 400 on Arches paper. An etching with color pochoir additions, this work is from Dalí's Our Historical Heritage portfolio, a series of 11 etchings which portray historical events and historic figures of the Old Testament.
The biblical account of The Rock, and its classic and essential imagery, have been depicted by Dalí entirely in the subtle coloration he utilized throughout his Our Historical Heritage portfolio. Moses, having led the Israelites from Egypt, was confronted by complaints about thirst and hunger. He appeals to God for help. The Book of Numbers recounts God instructing Moses to take the rod, and speak to a particular rock while the people are gathered together in view of it. Water, he is told, will emanate from it. Rather than speaking to the rock, Moses speaks to the crowd and strikes the rock, doing so twice, resulting in a strong flow of water.
And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also. —Book of Numbers 20:11
In Dalí's beautifully composed artwork, water flows freely from the biblical Rock; a lone tree grows from the crag of its surface; and a lone figure traverses the desert in front of a mountainous horizon. Hope is present in the form of a gracefully drawn golden figure, arms clasping a full sheaf of wheat.
In the lower right margin of the work is Dalí's original signature, boldly hand-signed in pencil. In the lower left margin it bears the edition number, also in pencil: 342/400. The work measures 25.75" in height x 19.75" width, and the paper bears the watermark "Arches France", directly below the edition number.
The Rock (The Source) is noted in Dalí expert Albert Field's authoritative Official Catalog of The Graphic Works of Salvador Dalí, Reference: 75-4 B, page 101. Published by Leon Amiel, Paris and New York, the work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
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".