Four watches, a fly, and a sleeping face

People who only know this painting from posters and coffee mugs are almost always startled when they meet it at MoMA in New York, and the reason is its size. They expect a wall-sized masterpiece, the way an icon “should” be big. The real canvas is roughly nine and a half inches tall by a little over a foot wide, smaller than an ordinary sheet of letter paper. You could cover it with a place mat. Everything Dalí does here is done at jewel scale, with a tiny brush, in a space you could hide under one hand. One of the most reproduced images in Surrealism is a miniature.

Now the scene. A bare, sun-flooded coastal plain runs back to a luminous sky. The foreground is in shadow; the far distance is in hard, golden sunlight. And lying across this empty stage are four pocket-watches (the kind that live on a chain in a waistcoat, not clocks on a wall, a small distinction worth getting right). Here is the count that matters, because nearly everyone gets it wrong: there are four watches, and only three of them are soft.

The three melting watches come first. One folds limply over the edge of a hard rectangular block at the left (a plinth, or a table). One sags off the bare branch of the dead tree. One slumps over the strange fleshy form lying in the foreground. They droop and pool like wet fabric, like the runny cheese itself, and yet each one keeps every working part: its hands, its numbered face, even the little winding stem on top. That is the disquiet of the thing. A pocket-watch is the hardest, most rule-bound object you can name, a precision instrument whose entire job is to stay exact and never bend. Dalí paints it sagging like a slice of melting cheese while leaving it perfectly, legibly a watch. The impossible is rendered as fact.

The fourth watch breaks the rule the other three follow. Toward the lower left, lying face-down on the hard block, is a closed pocket-watch, deep orange, its lid shut. It has not gone soft at all. It is hard, and it is crawling with ants. This is the detail people miss when they call the painting “four melting clocks”: three melt, and the fourth stays rigid and shut and is being devoured. Ants run all through Dalí’s work as a sign of decay and rot, rooted in a childhood horror of decomposition, so the one hard watch is also the one rotting. Near it, on the face of one of the soft watches, sits a single fly, a tiny, near-photographic touch that rewards the close look and quietly insists, again, on the “dream photograph” realism.

At the center of the foreground lies the strangest form of all: a soft, fleshy, eyelashed creature, boneless, draped by one of the melting watches, lying on the ground like something asleep. The long lashes and the heavy nose mark it as a profile head, seen from the side. Art historians have long read it as a distorted self-portrait of Dalí, an approximation of his own face in profile, kin to the very similar boneless head at the center of his earlier painting The Great Masturbator(1929). This is the standard scholarly reading rather than a certainty: what art historians see, an interpretation, not a caption Dalí signed. Read as a sleeper, it gives the whole picture its frame. This is a dream-image, and at its center lies someone dreaming.

Behind the watches and the sleeping head, the one stretch of solid, recognizable reality: a band of glowing golden cliffs and a still sea under a clear sky. This is a real place. It is the rugged coast Dalí grew up beside, the rocks of Cap de Creus on the Costa Brava, near his home at Portlligat(the shadowed height in the distance is sometimes identified as Puig Pení, though on thinner evidence). The choice is what sells the whole illusion. Set the soft, impossible watches against a faithfully painted real coastline, in real sunlight, and the eye, having accepted the cliffs, has no foothold to reject the watches. The realism of the place is what makes the impossibility of the objects feel like simple fact.