What is the title of Salvador Dalí's famous painting with melting clocks?

The title of Salvador Dalí’s famous painting with melting clocks is The Persistence of Memory.

Dalí painted this small oil-on-canvas work in 1931, during his central Surrealist period. It shows limp pocket watches draped over a barren landscape, a dead tree, and a strange biomorphic figure resembling the artist’s own face. The painting turns the familiar measurement of time into something unstable and dreamlike.

The work is often interpreted as a meditation on memory, dreams, and the collapse of fixed ideas about time. However, Dalí reportedly said the soft watches were inspired not by Einstein’s theory of relativity but by the sight of melting Camembert cheese. The interpretation remains open rather than being a single officially declared meaning.

Common mix-ups include calling it The Melting Clocks or The Soft Watches. Those are descriptive nicknames, not the painting’s canonical title. The original is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.