Which artist painted the 1937 Salvador Dalí work Swans Reflecting Elephants?

Salvador Dalí painted the 1937 work Swans Reflecting Elephants.

The painting shows three swans on a lake, with their reflections appearing below them as elephant-like forms. This visual transformation is an example of Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical” approach, in which an image can be read as more than one thing depending on how the viewer interprets it.

The landscape is associated with the Catalan surroundings familiar from Dalí’s life and work. The calm surface of the water makes the visual reversal especially striking: the swans are real elements in the scene, while their reflections seem to produce an entirely different set of animals.

The title can cause confusion with Dalí’s separate painting The Elephants, made in 1948. Swans Reflecting Elephants is earlier and uses reflection as the mechanism for the transformation. It is also distinct from Surrealist works by Miró or Magritte, who developed different visual strategies.