Salvador Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory in 1931, creating one of the most recognizable images in modern art.
The small oil painting is dominated by soft, sagging pocket watches draped over a barren landscape. Dalí’s precise technique makes the impossible objects look almost physically convincing, a hallmark of his Surrealist style. The scene also includes a hard orange watch covered with ants and a strange biomorphic form often interpreted as a distorted self-portrait.
The painting was first exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932 and sold for $250. The Museum of Modern Art acquired it in 1934, where it remains. It is often nicknamed The Melting Clocks or The Soft Watches, but those are descriptive popular titles rather than the work’s official title. Dalí later said the watches were inspired by the softness of melting Camembert, not directly by Einstein’s theory of relativity.