‘Le chevalier’ by Salvador Dali depicts a knight hold a scroll and shield while charging on his mount. © Christie’s
By Equestrian Life
An equestrian artwork by famous surrealist artist Salvador Dali will be auctioned in New York later this month.
The piece titled Le chevalier is expected to go for around half a million Australian dollars, with an estimated range of £220,000 and £260,000.
Completed in 1954, this piece is among 27 lots up for auction in ‘The Art of the Surreal’ sale at Christies in New York on March 23.
An anonymous sale, the ambiguous phrase ‘The Property of a Lady’ adds mystery to the piece.
In a description provided by Christie’s, the piece is a mixture of delicate watercolour and thin strokes of pen and ink.
“Salvador Dalí’s 1954 composition Le chevalier is dominated by a monumental horse and rider charging triumphantly through the scene, their forms heroically towering over the landscape.
“Bearing a scroll and shield, and wearing laurel leaves tucked behind his ears, the dashing knight seems to have been plucked from an ancient Greek myth, his muscular form suggesting a heroic figure such as Herakles, perhaps riding one of the mares of Diomedes.
“Behind the knight and his steed, a frieze-like sequence of otherworldly characters are dotted along the shoreline of a quiet inlet, which contains echoes of the landscape near Dalí’s home in Port Lligat in Northern Spain.
“More than any other place on earth, it was the bay at Port Lligat that provided the landscape of Dalí’s hallucinatory visions. It was the place where the paranoiac-critical images of his paintings repeatedly seemed to emerge before his eyes and the enigmatic shapes of its hills and rocks gave form to so many of his strange and haunting images.
“Somewhat evocative of the mysterious shorelines of Arnold Böcklin’s paintings which Dalí had always admired, there is an underlying sense of odyssey and of the metaphorical Mediterranean voyages of antiquity in this work.”
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