What title did Salvador Dalí give his 1937 painting of a swan reflected as elephants?
Answer
Swans Reflecting Elephants
Answer
Swans Reflecting Elephants
Salvador Dalí titled his 1937 painting Swans Reflecting Elephants.
The painting shows three swans on a lake, with their reflections transformed into elephant-like shapes. The surrounding landscape is associated with Catalonia and with the rocky scenery Dalí repeatedly used in his paintings.
Its visual effect depends on transformation: the reflected forms do not simply repeat the swans but become a different group of animals. This kind of double image was central to Dalí’s interest in perception and optical ambiguity.
The painting belongs to Dalí’s paranoiac-critical period, a method he described as using controlled interpretation to discover multiple images in a single scene. It is sometimes confused with The Elephants, another Dalí work, but the swan-reflection composition has its own distinct title.
Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026