Golconda is the Magritte painting that shows men in bowler hats suspended across the sky like falling rain. René Magritte painted it in 1953.
The oil-on-canvas scene places dozens of nearly identical men above red-roofed buildings beneath a blue, partly cloudy sky. Their regular spacing forms a receding lattice, making the figures appear simultaneously like raindrops, floating balloons, or motionless objects in mid-air. The painting never definitively explains what is happening.
Magritte drew inspiration from photographs of soldiers parachuting during the First World War and transformed that visual idea into an uncanny urban spectacle. The bowler-hatted man became one of his signature repeated figures, often suggesting the anonymous modern everyman. A likeness of the poet Louis Scutenaire, who helped name the work, appears among the figures.
The title refers to Golconda, a historic city in Telangana, India, once associated with kingdoms and a legendary diamond trade. The painting is held by the Menil Collection in Houston. The Son of Man also features a bowler-hatted figure, but it does not depict men raining from the sky.