Who painted the 1929 Surrealist work The Treachery of Images?

René Magritte painted the 1929 Surrealist work The Treachery of Images.

The painting shows a carefully rendered pipe beneath the French sentence “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” meaning “This is not a pipe.” Magritte’s point is that the painted object is an image of a pipe, not a physical pipe that can be filled or smoked.

The work examines the difference between an object, its visual representation, and the words used to identify it. This concern with language and images became one of Magritte’s defining contributions to Surrealism. The painting is often discussed as a challenge to the assumption that realistic representation equals reality.

It is frequently called “the pipe painting,” but its established English title is The Treachery of Images. The work should not be confused with Magritte’s later paintings that also use pipes or the phrase’s broader philosophical implications.