Salvador Dalí received a whole series of editorial commissions in 1933, standing out among them illustrations for Les Chants de Maldoror and the cover for the magazine Minotauro. It was around this time when he created Zodiaque, a circle of twelve patrons whose support for Dalí would be compensated over the following years with works by the artist. The year of 1934 was also a turning point in his career. After being expelled from the surrealist group and having a number of solo exhibitions in Paris, his work went on show in New York for the first time, at the Julien Levy Gallery. He alternated frequent international trips with sojourns in Cadaqués. His home in Port Lligat, a converted old fishermen’s hut, was his favourite spot to relax and to create.

One of the members of Zodiaque, René Laporte, was given the painting The Triangular Hour and this drawing, Personnage mangeant des cerises (Character Eating Cherries), dedicated to his wife. In the foreground, a human figure with male features, modelled through circular forms and with prominent musculature is bringing a couple of cherries to his mouth with his left hand from a bunch he is holding in his right hand. In the background, another character rides a horse in curvet. A craggy mound is suggested on the horizon.

The figure of the horse on its hind legs, reminiscent of an equestrian portrait by Velázquez, is recurrent in many of Dalí’s works. It may well allude to roots and tradition—Christianity and the Arabic, the quixotic—or to a specific figure from history and literature.

All these elements are frequent in Dalí’s iconography. In his autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942) the painter narrated gruesome events from his childhood and youth in which cherries played an important role. Reality and fantasy are mixed in his descriptions, giving shape to new memories. Deeply influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Unconscious, Dalí poured into his work the whole process of how dreams are produced, combining anxieties, recent experiences and memories.

A keen reader of scientific advances, in this work, Dalí used his paranoiac-critical method to combine anatomical details of the muscles with geometric forms, modelling the human figure through circular shapes, thus establishing an association between them and the cherries being eaten. Through all those metaphors, the artist shrouded his own life experiences in mystery, connecting them with mythological figures, a process used to magnify his image as a genius and legend.

The work in fact is by Gala Salvador Dalí, which is how Dalí began to sign his works around 1930, as a way of acknowledging Gala’s contribution to his creative process.