Dream caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Wakening up, 1944 Salvador Dali (1904-1989)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Salvador Dali also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 7-8 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Dream caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Wakening up is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

The eye first registers a serene expanse of pale sky and glassy sea, against which the drama of the subconscious is suspended. A nude female figure - Gala, the painter’s constant muse - reclines weightless on a jagged raft of rock that itself floats above an indeterminate, limpid horizon. Close by hover two translucent droplets and a polished pomegranate, their stillness contradicted by the bee whose hum, unseen yet suggested, triggers the fantasy overhead. From the bursting fruit erupts a gleaming red fish; propelled from its open jaws leap two roaring tigers, claws outstretched, followed in swift trajectory by the glittering point of a bayonet. High above, an ivory elephant teeters on impossible flamingo legs, balancing an obelisk whose mass is undercut by its airy perch. The scene is both motionless and on the brink of shattering - an instant stretched to the limits of consciousness.

Dalí deploys a palette of crystalline clarity. The cool blue of the ocean fades to a near silvery horizon, a chromatic stage that amplifies every warm accent. The vermilion of the pomegranate, echoed in the fish’s scales and the tigers’ maws, vibrates against the turquoise sky, while Gala’s flesh is rendered in creamy, pearlescent tones that seem to catch the ambient light. The bayonet’s metallic glint, the faint violet cast in the elephant’s shadowed underbelly, and the soft pink of distant cloud all register as carefully modulated notes within a larger symphonic arrangement. Color here is not merely descriptive - it clarifies mental states, separating the cool hush of sleep from the heated surge of dream imagery and hinting at the imminence of awakening.

Technically, the canvas exemplifies the artist’s self-styled “hand-painted dream photographs.” Surfaces are painstakingly smoothed, brushstrokes virtually invisible, preserving the illusion of hyper-reality. Yet within this exactitude lie subtle painterly decisions: the tigers’ pelts are built through alternating translucent and opaque layers, giving their stripes tensile energy; the aqueous droplets are glazed so finely that they refract the hues behind them. Dalí’s handling of the rock slab - sharp-edged, with minute fissures - contrasts with the delicate sfumato shading of Gala’s limbs, foregrounding the tension between the corporeal and the imagined.

Compositionally, an oblique vector drives the eye from the lower left pomegranate to the upper right elephant, mirroring the accelerating arc of the dream narrative. The placement of major forms along this diagonal creates a visual crescendo - fruit, fish, tigers, bayonet - culminating at the poised blade that directs its threat back toward the sleeper. Negative space is equally instrumental: the expanse of sky and sea isolates each motif, allowing them to resonate like disparate thoughts coalescing in a single instant. Perspective remains ambiguous; the elephant’s attenuated legs defy rational scale, while the floating rock offers no stable ground, reinforcing the paradoxes of dream logic.

Painted in 1944, while Dalí was resident in wartime America, the work signals a brief return to his earlier paranoiac-critical investigations even as his wider practice was diversifying into fashion, film, and commercial design. The elongated title itself functions as an explicit homage to Freud’s exploration of the condensed, associative structures of dreams. Yet beyond Surrealist theory, the picture channels the anxieties of its historical moment: latent violence embodied by the bayonet, displacement expressed through the uprooted landscape, and the precarious balance of the elephant recalling the fragility of power. Hovering between stillness and eruption, the painting stages the razor-thin boundary separating inner reverie from external shock - a single second in which the private unconscious collides with the waking world.