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Description: 1898-1967
LE SÉDUCTEUR

measurements
15.8 by 20.4cm.

alternate measurements
6 1/4 by 8in.

Executed in 1956.

signed Magritte (upper left); signed Magritte, titled and dated 1956 on the reverse

gouache on paper

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Comité Magritte.

PROVENANCE

Private Collection, France
Acquired from the above by the present owner

NOTE

Le Sédecteur belongs to a group of works sharing the same title and subject matter that Magritte executed during the 1950s and early 1960s. The present work depicts the spectre-like ship, at one with the sea, set against a blue sky and wind-blown clouds. Sarah Whitfield wrote the following on his first work from this series: 'Writing to a friend about the first version of Le séducteur, an oil of 1950, Magritte told him that it represented the solution to the problem of water. As with his other works, he said, the image had been found through a kind of 'frantic contemplation', which he describes as a process of drawing the same image repeatedly until a chance line or a conjunction of lines dictated the solution. Those particular sketches have not come to light but a few sheets of the sort he describes have survived (they relate to works which date from either the 1950s or 1960s). While Magritte's habit of throwing drawings away makes it unwise to infer too much from the ones that he kept, this kind of obsessive drawing -- a form of doodling -- indicates a method of tapping the unconscious that brings to mind some of the experiments with automatism practiced by the Paris Surrealists in the 1920s. And, indeed, in the letter cited above, Magritte went on to associate this image with the realisation of a dream' (S. Whitfield, René Magritte (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London, 1992, n.p.).

This work has been requested for the exhibition of gouaches by René Magritte, to be held at the Fondation Dina Vierny, Musée Maillol in Paris from March to June 2006.