René Magritte painted The Son of Man in 1964.
The oil painting shows a suited man wearing a bowler hat, standing before a low wall and a cloudy sea-and-sky background. A bright green apple obscures most of his face, although one eye remains partly visible. Magritte’s deliberate concealment makes the ordinary scene feel mysterious and psychologically unsettling.
The work is often discussed alongside Magritte’s other paintings involving hidden faces, visual contradictions and familiar objects placed in strange contexts. Although The Son of Man is frequently called a Surrealist painting, Magritte disliked interpretations that treated his images as simple dream illustrations. He described his art as an attempt to reveal mystery in everyday life.
A common mix-up is confusing the painting’s title with the broader biblical phrase “Son of Man.” Magritte’s work is a specific 1964 painting, and its apple is not melting like the watches in Salvador Dalí’s better-known imagery.