Salvador Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory in 1931. The small oil painting is among the best-known images of Surrealism, showing soft watches draped over a barren landscape and a biomorphic shape often interpreted as a distorted face.
Dalí painted it while living in Paris and developing his mature Surrealist style. The work’s unusual treatment of time has led many viewers to connect it with dreams, memory, and the difference between measured time and psychological time. Dalí himself linked its imagery to the melting consistency of Camembert cheese.
The painting is often confused with later works that reuse soft watches, especially The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. That later picture was made in the 1950s and is not the original 1931 composition. The original is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.