Which Salvador Dalí painting, completed in 1931, shows melting watches?

Salvador Dalí’s 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory shows melting watches. The small oil painting places soft, distorted clocks across a stark landscape, creating one of the most recognizable images in twentieth-century art.

Dalí painted the work in the early period of his mature Surrealist style. Its limp watches contrast with the hard, precise surfaces of a platform, a tree, and a rocky background. A strange organic form lies at the center, often interpreted as a distorted self-portrait, though the painting resists one fixed explanation.

The image is commonly discussed as a meditation on time, memory, and the instability of perception. The clocks do not function like ordinary timepieces; instead, they make measured time appear flexible and dreamlike.

The painting is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is relatively small, measuring about 24 by 33 centimeters, despite its enormous cultural influence.