What did Dalí say inspired the melting watches in the painting?

Dalí said that Camembert cheese inspired the melting watches in *The Persistence of Memory*.

The artist later explained the idea through the image of a very strong Camembert becoming soft or melting in the sun. MoMA has also recorded his memorable phrase “the camembert of time,” linking the cheese’s yielding texture with the painting’s distorted pocket watches.

This anecdote is often simplified into the claim that Dalí painted cheese disguised as clocks. That is not what appears in the picture: the objects are watches, and the cheese story describes the visual association that supposedly prompted their limp, drooping forms. Dalí’s explanation also fits his Surrealist interest in unexpected connections between ordinary objects and dreamlike imagery.

The painting includes three soft watches and a fourth closed watch covered with ants. The solid watch helps sharpen the contrast between mechanical time and the strange, unstable world around it. Dalí completed the small oil painting in 1931, and it later became one of Surrealism’s defining images.