Salvador Dali was a Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, designer, film maker and writer. After working in a variety of styles, influenced by Cubism, Futurism, and Metaphysical Painting, he had turned to Surrealism by 1929.

Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism, claiming that this was the source of his creative energy. He adopted the Surrealist idea of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method that he named 'critical paranoia'.

During the heyday of Surrealism in the 1930's Dali produced several of the established 'icons' of the movement, using a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal 'dream' space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory character of his imagery. He described his pictures as 'hand-painted dream photographs' and had certain favourite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made of melting.