Salvador Dalí’s 1948 painting showing elephants with elongated legs in a desert landscape is titled The Elephants.
The composition places two large elephants across a barren, warm-toned landscape. Their extremely thin, elongated legs create an impossible contrast between the animals’ heavy bodies and their apparently fragile supports. Dalí used this visual contradiction to produce the unsettling, dreamlike effect associated with his mature surrealist work.
The elephants carry obelisks on their backs, adding associations of power, monuments, and classical grandeur. Dalí had used elephants in earlier imagery, but The Elephants is distinct from Swans Reflecting Elephants, the 1937 painting in which swans and their reflections form elephant shapes.
The work is also separate from The Temptation of Saint Anthony, painted two years earlier, which includes an elephant among a procession of temptations. These similar motifs can cause title mix-ups, but The Elephants is the standalone 1948 composition centered on two long-legged animals.