The Persistence of Memory, 1931 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 6-7 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 The Persistence of Memory 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.

Salvador Dalí’s "The Persistence of Memory" is a painting that almost taunts the viewer with its eerie calm. Here, time itself has gone soft, draping over the landscape like something forgotten and melting in the heat. The surreal composition - with its limp, melting clocks and barren landscape - invites us to question everything we know about reality. This is a painting where the ordinary is undone, and even the most fundamental truths are twisted into something unnerving.

At the heart of the composition, time loses its solidity. The clocks, usually rigid instruments of order, sag and drape like overripe fruit, seemingly unbound by the laws of physics. One drips off the edge of a ledge, while another bends unnaturally over a branch of a nearly barren tree. The softness of these once-precise objects distorts everything we associate with their function. Dalí famously described them as "the camembert of time" - cheese-like, losing its form as it warms in the sun. The fluidity of the clocks is a direct challenge to permanence, to order, and to rationality.

The colors Dalí employs are startling in their contrast. The foreground, dominated by warm browns and the pale, fleshy tones of the strange, featureless figure, is in sharp opposition to the cool blues and pinks of the distant horizon. The landscape is barren, almost dead, with only the jagged cliffs in the background anchoring the scene to any recognizable reality. The cliffs, a reminder of Dalí’s homeland of Catalonia, add a touch of literal reality to an otherwise dreamlike world. It’s a subtle grounding, but it reminds us that even this bizarre, unearthly vision has its roots in something familiar.

At the center of the composition, there’s a peculiar, draped creature - part of Dalí’s signature dream logic. The strange, amorphous form, with its loose, mollusk-like shape and eyelash-lined profile, hints at something grotesquely organic. The creature looks like a soft, collapsed face - likely an abstracted version of Dalí himself. Its presence is disturbing, with the long, insect-like lashes adding an unsettling layer of surrealism. It is part of the fabric of the dream, blurring the line between the human and the alien.

Then there are the ants. Small, but significant. Crawling over a gold pocket watch in the lower left corner, they serve as symbols of decay, of inevitable destruction. Dalí often used ants in his work as representations of death and rot. Here, they feast on the remnants of time, amplifying the theme of impermanence that runs through the painting. Even the metal of a watch, which should symbolize endurance, is reduced to a breeding ground for decay.

Dalí's technique is precise - every object is rendered with almost photographic clarity, a hallmark of his "paranoiac-critical method." Yet the scene is utterly nonsensical. The crispness of his brushwork draws you in, but what you encounter is pure confusion. This paradox - the tension between clarity and chaos - is what makes "The Persistence of Memory" so compelling. The landscape, the objects, the grotesque forms all pull us into a dream state where time, space, and reality unravel.

In the end, "The Persistence of Memory" is more than just a visual puzzle - it’s a philosophical one. Time, decay, and memory are questioned in a painting that feels both intimate and infinite, as if the rules of the world have been quietly rewritten before our eyes. Dalí has created a vision that stays with us long after we’ve left the canvas, lingering like the melting clocks, slowly slipping from the grasp of reason.